Tag: Writing

Streaming Back to the Future

My calendar had a big red circle on September 16th. I didn’t want to forget that this past Wednesday Apple TV would be broadcasting Episode 1 of the sixth season of Slow Horses, my favorite off-kilter British spy series.

So I sank into my favorite chair, lowered the window shade, and dimmed the lights as the Mick Jagger theme song began. I watched, enraptured, for an hour as the slovenly Jackson Lamb farted, the immaculate First Desk Diana Taverner calculated, and the insufferable Roddy Ho preened.

And then it was over.

No Episode 2 to help fill my afternoon. No binging horses for me. I’d have to remember the plot line until next week!

Of course, waiting a week for another episode shouldn’t seem strange to me. That’s how I watched television for much of my life.

In the ’60s and ’70s, you watched an episode of a show and came back a week later for another. Most episodes were self-contained, so there wasn’t much to remember. Later, shows like Hill Street Blues began stretching stories over multiple episodes, forcing viewers to pay attention to the “arc.”

Then came streaming and binging.

Barb and I started by discovering shows after they had been on for years. We watched Parenthood, Breaking Bad, and Sons of Anarchy long after their first episodes, and sometimes their last ones, had aired. We could watch one episode a night and get the full story in a matter of weeks, or, in the case of 11 seasons of Shameless, a few months.

Netflix took things a step further. Instead of making viewers wait, it began releasing entire seasons of new shows at once. Suddenly, the only thing standing between you and the next episode was self-control.

But now I’m wondering whether something was lost along the way.

When you wait a week, you have time to think about what you watched. You wonder what happens next. You talk about it with someone else who saw it. A character or plot twist has time to settle into your brain before another one pushes it aside.

With binging, one episode can blur into the next. Barb and I have watched some very good series that we can barely remember a year later. Did that happen because we’re getting older, or because we swallowed eight hours of Your Friends and Neighbors in a week?

Probably a little of both.

So maybe Apple is doing me a favor by making me wait for my next Slow Horses. Maybe anticipation really does add something to the pleasure.

Now after decades of VCRs, DVRs, DVDs, and streaming, television has accomplished something remarkable. It has brought me right back to where I started. I’ll have to wait until next week to find out what happens.

I’d better circle next Wednesday on my calendar.

Barb Tells It Better

On paper, I am the storyteller of the family. But in real life, my tales tend to be short and to the point, while Barb can mesmerize an audience, weaving a story she has honed to perfection. Here is Barb’s latest not-so-tall tale. Not surprisingly, I am the straight man.

“It was about 2 a.m. when the alarm went off,” Barb begins.

“I was disoriented and felt around the nightstand for my glasses. Once I found them, I looked for Les, but he wasn’t in bed. I staggered to the alarm pad and saw that the family room sliding patio door was the cause of the alarm. I used our code to turn it off.

“Calling for Les, I made my way to the offending door. I remembered that a serviceman had used it that morning. We had probably forgotten to lock it, but that didn’t explain why it had opened a little and set off the alarm.

“I knew the police would show up, so I went to the front door to wait for them. And still no Les.

“After about a minute, I saw flashlights coming up the walk and two policemen appeared.

“‘We’re sorry, ma’am, but we got a call that there was an alarm going off. It turns out it was for the house next door, but we came to your house by mistake a few minutes ago. While checking all your doors, I think we set off your alarm.’

“‘OK, that explains the alarm. But I have a bigger problem. My husband is missing.’”

At this point in telling her story, Barb is beginning to grin, a twinkle coming to her eye. It is the officer’s next words that send her—and her audience—into hysterics.

“Looking over my shoulder, the policeman says, ‘You mean the man in the green underpants standing behind you?’”

As the laughter engulfs Barb’s audience, I explain that I had trouble sleeping that night and had gone into the guest bedroom so I wouldn’t wake Barb, only to appear when the police were at the door

“And he didn’t hear the alarm! No wonder his doctor says he needs to get the wax out of his ears.”

And that is the difference between the two storytellers in our family. I’ll write this one down and you’ll smile. Hear Barb tell it, and you’ll be laughing until tears run down your face—and my underpants will be getting greener with every telling.

Sorry! Hasbro. You Can’t Change That Rule!

Barb and I were absorbed in an intense game of Sorry! with Captain Comeback and Superheroine Girl, our 5- and 8-year-old grandchildren, when I made the discovery.

The game set we were using was the third or fourth set our family has gone through since we first started playing the board game with our children more than 35 years ago. We have spent countless rainy days, afternoons, and evenings chasing each other’s colorful pegs around the board.

Playing Sorry! has helped first our kids and then our grandkids learn counting and strategy. They have also learned how not to have a fit when a sibling or cousin flips over a dreaded Sorry card and sends their peg back to Start. And most importantly, they have learned patience, as turn after turn goes by without drawing the 1 or 2 card that allows one of their markers to leave Start and begin the trek toward home.

By the age of 5, any family member knows the rules backwards and forwards. We have made a few minor changes as the years have gone by, but waiting for that 1 or 2 card has been the requirement that anchors the game. So I was amazed when, casually reading the latest set of instructions, I discovered that a player can now start moving a peg after drawing any number card. This is heresy!

I suppose Hasbro has updated the rules to fit with modern times and limited attention spans. I am sure the new rules speed up the game and keep everyone more actively involved. But to my family, this change is as absurd and unnecessary as, well, I don’t know, automatically putting a runner on second base in the 10th inning of a baseball game.

Sorry!, like baseball, is not meant to be played at a TikTok pace. It needs to build slowly, with plenty of time for Captain Comebacks and Superheroine Girls to rebound and claim the lead.

And that is how we will play it in our house, for every generation that comes our way.

I Owe Someone a Note

I’m listening to The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I’m only partway through, so don’t worry. This isn’t a review, and there will be no spoilers.

One sentence made me stop and hit rewind.

“He was finding confidence behind the veil of ink on the page.”

That’s a beautiful line. It also made me realize how much of my life I’ve spent communicating through the written word.

One summer in high school, I came home from overnight camp corresponding with about fifteen girls. Long-distance phone calls weren’t an option. Fifteen nightly phone calls would have bankrupted my parents.

To keep eall the letters straight, I created a chart on a piece of cardboard. Down the left side were the girls’ names. Across the top were columns for the date each letter arrived and the date I mailed my reply. My personal correspondence log. Looking back, it may have been a little obsessive. At the time, it felt perfectly reasonable.

The cardboard disappeared years ago, which is probably for the best. Otherwise, one of my grandchildren might someday uncover it and conclude that Baba had been far more popular in high school than he actually was.

Letter writing eventually gave way to pathology reports, emails, newsletters, and blog posts. The audience has changed. The pleasure hasn’t. I still enjoy staring at a blank screen or a piece of paper, chasing an idea around until it finally behaves.

A few months ago, I found myself buying a box of correspondence cards on Amazon. Not birthday cards. Not sympathy cards. Just simple white correspondence cards with a gray border for thank-you notes and the occasional handwritten letter. The kind of stationery that practically insists you mind your manners.

In this era of texts, emails, Facebook posts, and emojis, buying stationery felt almost rebellious. But the cards are on my desk now, and every so often one finds its way into an envelope.

It turns out I never stopped being a correspondent. So excuse me, I owe someone a note.

I Rarely Click Banner Ads

I rarely click banner ads. Until one New York Times ad caught my attention.

It wasn’t the headline. It was the picture. I had never seen anything like it in a public advertisement before. To most readers, it was probably nothing more than an abstract swirl of pink and purple. They likely scrolled right past it without a second thought.

I couldn’t. It was a photomicrograph, a photograph taken with through a microscope.

For forty-five years, this had been my world. While other physicians examined patients or interpreted X-rays, I peered through a microscope, searching for the subtle variations that separate healthy tissue from disease.

The reproduction wasn’t especially good. The image was small and lacked the crisp detail I was accustomed to seeing through a microscope. Still, I recognized it immediately for what it was: a photomicrograph of a tumor.

In forty-five years of pathology, I had never seen a photomicrograph used to draw the attention of the general public. So I took a screenshot.

Only later, did I follow the link to a story about a clinical trial for women with resistant ovarian cancer. The research was interesting, but it wasn’t what stayed with me. The image did.

For the past month, every time I came across that screenshot on my desktop, I found myself wondering why it had affected me so much. Eventually I realized it wasn’t really about my evaluation of the images.

It was about seeing one of the tools of my profession in a setting where I never expected to find it.

During my career, photomicrographs were tools. They appeared in pathology textbooks, medical journals, conference presentations, and tumor boards. They helped physicians make diagnoses and decisions, teach students, and communicate discoveries. I never expected to see one used as the visual hook in an online advertisement.

I thought I had taken a screenshot of an unusual ad campaign.

It turned out I had taken a screenshot that inspired this blog.

The Accidental Book Club.

No meetings, refreshments or books about cholera.

I am very fond of books. It’s book clubs I’m not quite as fond of.

But I think I may have found something better.

Several years ago, I belonged to a book club that specialized in worthy nonfiction. We read biographies of Ronald Reagan and the Wright brothers, along with a detailed account of a cholera outbreak in London. I learned a great deal from all of them. Unfortunately, none of them made me eager to climb into bed and find out what happened next.

Eventually, I drifted away.

I do have several friends who share my taste in spy novels and mysteries. We happily trade recommendations, but rarely go beyond “You should read this” or “I liked that one.” What I miss is the deeper conversation.

So who do I turn to when I want to compare and contrast my favorite writers, revisit a twisty plot point, or find an outstanding BBC adaptation? These days, my favorite book club consists of one member and one artificial intelligence. Its name is ChatGPT.

The beginning of our “book club” was accidental. One day I asked Chat to rank the ten greatest spy novels ever written. Almost instantly, it responded with a list of twenty. In true AI fashion, a few books appeared twice, a couple were attributed to the wrong author, and the numbering was more aspirational than accurate. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, however, we had refined it to a credible Top Ten. Remarkably, at the very top sat John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, my personal favorite.

What surprised me was not the speed of the answers. It was how much the exchange felt like talking with another avid reader.

Over the next half hour, we dissected much of le Carré’s voluminous body of work. We discussed why my friends hated the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy while I loved it. When Chat listed the key characters in the George Smiley trilogy, I pointed out its glaring omission of George’s wife, Ann. Chat immediately conceded the point and offered a thoughtful summary of Ann’s crucial role in Smiley’s story.

Next we turned to my current favorite author, Mick Herron. Chat seemed as enthusiastic about the Slow Horses novels as I was. We discussed the many faults of Jackson Lamb and the brilliance of Kristin Scott Thomas in the television adaptation. I forgot to ask what Chat thought of the Mick Jagger theme song, but I’m confident it would have had an opinion.

My AI book club isn’t perfect. There are no hors d’oeuvres, no Scotch on the rocks, and no opportunity to impress anyone with my knowledge of John le Carré. But I can convene it at any time, discuss any book I choose, and never have to leave home. And what surprises me most is that the experience feels less like using a tool and more like talking with a fellow reader.

And unlike my last book club, nobody is going to make me read another book about cholera. One book about that is enough, even for a pathologist!

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Three Days of Comcast

Streaming bundles, endless transfers, and the limits of modern technology

When you ask friends and neighbors which mega-company provides the worst customer service, Comcast/Xfinity is usually the landslide winner. Few businesses generate more frustration than the area’s dominant cable and internet provider.

Until recently, I was not part of the anti-Comcast chorus. They provided a service, I paid the bill, and the internet and streaming kept humming along. Even after cutting the cord, I stayed with Comcast as the best way to keep everything connected. Then came a glitch.

When I transitioned to Comcast’s streaming package without cable TV, the bundle included services like Hulu, Netflix, and Apple TV. Comcast assured customers they would handle all the behind-the-scenes details, canceling old subscriptions and activating the new bundled versions without interrupting access to Ted Lasso, Your Friends and Neighbors, or our guilty pleasure, Shameless.

But then I noticed that Apple TV was still charging us separately.

In the grand scheme of things, this was hardly a major crisis. But Barb and I don’t enjoy Ted Lasso enough to pay for it twice, especially while the series is on hiatus. So began my three-day descent into the Comcast customer service labyrinth.

My efforts to resolve the problem included Comcast’s online chat assistant, multiple live agents, a visit to a Comcast retail store, a live video session with a Comcast representative in Egypt, Apple customer service, and ChatGPT, which by that point had become both therapist and technical consultant.

Each Comcast representative marched me through the identical sequence of links, toggles, logins, refreshes, and reboots, none of which resolved the problem. Each agent assured me detailed notes were being added to my file before putting me on hold. Those notes, apparently, vanished into the same digital black hole that swallows forgotten passwords and two-factor authentication codes. I have now come to believe that “putting a note in your file” is simply customer service shorthand for “the next person I hand you off to will know nothing.” KLM used the same line while we were rearranging our Africa trip, with identical results.

I would like to tell you that after all that work, our streaming issue is resolved. I would like to, but I can’t.

The final Comcast agent advised me to wait until the current Apple billing cycle ends in July and “see where we are then.” As he explained it, “Those people at Apple do things weird.”

And you can put that note into my file.

Down for the Count

A leg cramp, a labradoodle, and an unexpected view of the world

As I compose this blog entry in my mind, I am lying on the laundry room floor, staring at the ceiling. Another leg cramp has brought me down, but unlike the one that brought so much levity to a room full of canasta-playing women, this one struck while I was alone, bending to move laundry from the washing machine into the dryer.

Barb, usually my savior in these situations, is away for most of the afternoon enjoying a “day of beauty.” With no one here to massage my leg, I know I’ll remain on this floor until the tightness eases enough for me to bend my knee and pull myself upright.

Cooper the labradoodle is scratching at the laundry room door. I keep it closed when I’m in here; otherwise a sock or T-shirt will be in his mouth before I can slam the washing machine shut. And if the dryer door is open, he’ll immediately claim a dryer ball, his favorite prize. Even if I let him in, there isn’t much he could do to help me, and I’d rather avoid having my face licked while immobilized on the floor.

Lying here gives me an unusual vantage point. I can see the dead bugs lining the glass dome of the overhead light fixture. Cleaning that just moved onto my to-do list, though I doubt I’ll feel much like climbing ladders today. I’ve always thought I did a good job cleaning the dryer’s lint trap, but from down here I can see a layer of lint collecting along the bottom edge of the dryer door. At least that’s something I can clean without getting up.

With my bottom on the floor and time on my hands, I dig my phone out of my pocket. I rarely listen to audiobooks at home, saving them for car rides and Cooper walks, but this seems like the appropriate time and place for my latest thriller. I rest the phone on my stomach and, without earbuds, turn up the volume enough for the hero’s murder investigation to echo through the laundry room.

Even with the novel going through my head, I wonder what caused today’s spasm. Was it yesterday’s first round of golf of the season? The stops and starts of eight games of pickleball this morning? Dehydration? Or did I simply twist the wrong way moving laundry from one machine to the other?

The pain is easing now. I can begin to flex. I’ll let Cooper in, press the start button on the dryer, and go on with my day.

All is well…until the next time.

One Word Describes Me. What Describes YOU?

What junk email do you receive? Among the plethora of posts sent to me every day is WordDaily, a newsletter that provides exactly what it says it does. Each morning at about 6 AM a new word appears in my inbox accompanied by its definition, pronunciation, and etymology. A few descriptive quotes complete the page.

Sometimes I recognize the daily selection (xiphoid, auteur, emeritus) even if I don’t have a precise definition at my neural synapses. Other times I learn a new word (perdurable, precatory, yare), and the belt reigning in my mental dictionary can expand by a notch.

Yesterday’s word was”phlegmatic.” It’s a word I have seen, but never used. I have always assumed it is related to “phlegm” and conceived of a phlegmatic person as someone suffering from a stuffy nose or a congested chest. And phlegmatic does have that derivation and can mean that. But that is not the definition that WordDaily gave and not the definition that interests me.

What definition did the newsletter present? Having an unemotional and stolidly calm disposition. After the definition, Queen Elizabeth II was given as an example of a phlegmatic person. WordDaily missed the boat. For “unemotional and stolidly calm” WordDaily should have looked at a living person, one of its subscribers…me!

I am as stony as the Rock of Gibraltar. The last person to see me cry was the obstetrician who slapped my butt at my delivery, and I barely got out a squawk before they rushed me into a newborn incubator. When unexpectedly severed from my pathology group, I left the room without raising my voice or losing my cool. I may give a fist bump to a partner after they make a great pickleball shot, but I am the first to try to cool down heated tempers after a blown line call or other on-court shenanigans.

There are a few times that I come close to letting loose. I almost danced a jig after my third par in nine holes last week and came dangerously close to hurling my phone at the TV screen during President Biden’s disastrous debate the week before. I am sure Barb can find a few other examples of times when I failed to be cool, calm, and collected. She would undoubtedly begin with the chair celebration at our son’s wedding.

Is preternatural calmness a good quality? It was an asset when I was the Board of Education president, especially when negotiating contracts. Throughout my life it has kept me from any bare-knuckles fights with their accompanying broken bones or screaming matches with their accompanying broken relationships. On the flip side though, I might have missed some adrenalin rush thrills and emotional purges.

But that’s who I am. I’m glad WordDaily gave me “phlegmatic,” the perfect word to describe myself.

Hey, today’s WordDaily just came in. The new word of the day is Epigrammatic: Of the nature or in the style of an epigram; concise, clever, and amusing. Maybe THAT’S me!

What do you think? And who and what are YOU?

Scalpels to Stage Plays: Autopsies, Case Studies, and Blogging Adventures

Long ago I lost count of the number of blogs I have posted in the last nine years. My best estimate would be that it has been about 700 times that I have asked you to spend a few moments with me. But before I became a blogger, writing for pleasure (mine, if not yours,) I wrote a few articles published in medical journals–not enough articles for me to be considered an academic, but enough to have multiple mentions in Index Medicus, the Yellow Pages of medical articles in reputable journals.

What was I writing about? Much like my current blogs, every scientific paper was different from the last, with a different focus and frequently intended for a different audience. My earliest papers were predominantly case studies, reporting interesting and/or previously undescribed phenomena I encountered while doing my first 100 autopsies as a pathology resident. One of the papers integrated in-utero radiographic findings with autopsy findings in a condition known as polysplenia1. A second case 2 involved detective work à la Quincy, as a colleague and I traced a patient’s history to determine the source of a triangular portion of plastic in their stomach that had caused fatal blood loss. Our investigation and publication earned us our hospital’s Resident Research of the Year award–scant consolation to the family of the deceased.

While still in my residency, my next published paper dealt with the use of frozen sections on needle biopsies of the breast for the diagnosis of breast cancer 3. My paper, based on a series of cases at my hospital, took a position against this practice. This was significant in an era when a malignant diagnosis on a frozen section of a breast biopsy was frequently followed by a modified radical mastectomy. After the paper’s publication a nationally known pathologist asked me to contribute a chapter to his forthcoming book on breast pathology. In a major career faux pas, I passed on the opportunity.

As my residency closed, I was asked to contribute a thought piece to another national journal, discussing the future of pathology 4. 45 years later I don’t remember what I saw in my crystal ball, although I know I failed to predict the world of genomics, digitization, and artificial intelligence, all of which have revolutionized pathology.

Once in my career as a community hospital jack-of-all-trades pathologist, my paper writing tapered off significantly. A short piece on urine cultures 5 (fun stuff) was followed many years later by a detailed description of a simple inking technique to prevent mix-ups of biopsy specimens in the lab 6. Significant in its time, that method is now out-moded with the easy availability of bar-coding and DNA analysis to confirm specimen identity.

Throughout my career, the laboratory data I have provided has been used in countless conference presentations, abstracts, and journal publications. While my name appears on many of those, I don’t feel much personal connection with them. My hands weren’t on the keyboard or posterboard.

In retirement, my medical writing days are past–almost. My as-yet-unproduced play does have a medical aspect. As the saying goes, write what you know, and know what you write. So far, it has worked for me.

For those of you who are curious:

  • 1 Arch Pathol Lab Med. 107:202-203, 1983
  • 2 Southern Medical Journal. 74:900-901, 1981
  • 3 Breast. 8:11-13, 1982
  • 4 Pathologist. 37:1983
  • 5 Laboratory Medicine.1985
  • 6 Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2009;133:295-297