rational drinking

Since my first taste of beer in view of the White House in March ’69, me an innocent 16 year old junior, I have not met an alcoholic beverage I didn’t like.  This would seem to be incongruent with my supposedly high powered brain, but man I loved those weekend evenings with a car full of buddies and a case in the back.  It got bad enough my assistant principal, Johnny Mac, called me in to ask me why I was going on drunks every weekend.  As was ever my wont, I kept right on doing it, getting straight As so they’d shut up.  I spent quite a bit of time in the back of chemistry class calculating what would be the best deal for our upcoming weekend, based on cost and relative alcohol content.  Was a good mental exercise, sort of like baseball stats.  No wonder my math SATs were through the roof.

I sort of slipped away from this in the ensuing years.  The calculations, not the drinking.  That’s continued.  I can count one DUI, in Maryland, which even included a few hours in jail.  There’s been no AA, though I’ve seen a few “alcohol counselors” at the U who provide cheerful suggestions how to monitor and hopefully reduce my drinking.  I deleted their apps from my phone last year.  The most serious stretch saw me in a program for disciplinary purposes because of opioid prescribing.  Total abstinence was required, enforced by random pee tests. I’d have to call a number each morning to see if it was “my day”.  The pee tests could detect any alcohol within 5 days, so this was serious.   I found a way around it when I travelled, and thoroughly enjoyed my beer and oysters in Half Moon Bay.  Seven months into the program, my coordinator called me to say her committee had judged that alcohol was not one of my problems and I could quit that nonsense (not her words).  Now Kathy says I overcompensated after.  My weight began to climb and who knows how many more alcohol asshole moments I provided.  To this day, I recommend against total abstinence for those who wish to cut back, citing the rebound effect.

I gained a lot of weight utilizing Traverse City Whiskey as self medication for my brachial plexus injury and have managed to shed most of it having apples for lunch.  COVID has brought its own challenges, and alcohol consumption is definitely up at 1611 Harbal.  For a while, we were keeping the caloric consequences in check by daily 4 mile round trip walks to Kathy’s office.  With the campus shutdown, we do almost none of those, and are left to our own designs to getting in what walkies that we can.  Apparently, these are not enough say my 501s.  I have acquired some comfy sweatpants, bit those are way too accommodating.  I’ve observed for years that health care professionals, mainly nurses, who wear scrubs all the time get ever fatter as they have no feedback from their clothes.

I’ve decided to face my enemy head on.  But of course he is also my dear friend.  In the spirit of Mr. Peach’s chemistry class, here is how these libations figure:

drinkserving size% alcoholCalories/servingcost/servingGm alcohol/servingCost/gm alcoholcalories/gm alcohol
beer12 oz/355 mL7.6*228$3.502713¢8.4
Red wine5 oz/150 mL13.5125$420.2520¢6.2
whiskey1.5 oz/45 mL51.7***135$223.279¢5.8
whiskey1.5 oz/45 mL43110$219.3510.5¢5.7
vodka1.5 oz/45 mL40****97$1.20186.6¢5.4

* Founders Harvest Ale; $13.99/4 pack

** based on $20/750 mL bottle

*** based on Traverse City Whiskey, $34/750 mL bottle

**** Ugly Dog $19.99/750 mL bottle

These are all Michigan products, on purpose.  We just observed our 184th birthday yesterday.  You can for sure find cheaper sources for all of these products.  Some results will confirm suspicions you probably already had.  Beer definitely gives you the fatter buzz, with all those extra calories per gram of alcohol.  Distilled spirits are cheaper than their fermented cousins in getting you off.  And the bargain basement is clearly occupied by the Ugly Dog, whose clear spirits get you off cheaper and more leanly than anyone else.  How about that.  As Frank Sinatra said: “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”

“All you need is love” say our Beatles

Ray

Ray Kamalay and I are about the same age. Except he has talent. He took his ’74 philosophy degree from U of D and did who knows what, but on the side became quite an accomplished singer and jazz guitarist http://www.raykamalay.com/. I met him November before last when he came to perform for one of the freebie Thursday noon concerts at U-hospital in the open area on the first floor. His spare guitar-bass-drums jazz was just what I like, and he threw in some of his own compositions, which had a nice caustic edge, just like an old philosophy major might do. Jump to January, when he played at a library, in West Bloomfield. Nobody shushed, and the same wonderful stuff flowed forth. I took Kathy, and she was taken also. ‘Twas to be the last concert we would see in Michigan in 2020. I never paid a dime for any of his concerts, but I did mail him checks for some of his CDs.

Not to let his creative juices be stinted by the COVID lockdown, he instead turned himself to writing about it. Here’s the tune he produced, with a message for us all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFz5XbQWK-o

I sent this to my high school English teacher Mrs.Pharriss, who is keeping an e-scrapbook of things COVID. She loved the song and of course parked it in her scrapbook

I wrote him recently to thank him for telling me about a cassette of Michigan songs he had produced for the sequecentennial (1987), “Michigan in Song” https://www.discogs.com/Various-Michigan-In-Song-Traditional-And-Contemporary-Songs-Of-Michigan/release/11567551, available from the Michigan State museum shop 517-355-2370 https://www.museum.msu.edu/museum-store/. Although Ray produced it, it is decidedly folky rather than jazzy, and Ray appears on just one track. I asked him how his “hit” was doing, and he thought it probably wasn’t, citing one YouTuber’s comment “I hate this”, not sure if that meant the song or the situation. I offered he just needed to bring it to the attention of the right people, giving him Fauci’s e-mails: faucia@od.nih.gov, faucia@mail.nih.gov. Since his song promotes responsible behaviour, surely it should get wider play. Spread the word.

how about that Plaquenil?

That much maligned cinchona bark extract derivative got a little boost recently. On January 14, a group out of Hackensack (New Jersey) Meridian Health Network published their findings on the effect of Plaquenil on keeping COVID-infected patients out of the hospital*. They looked at all the patients diagnosed with COVID in their ERs or clinics from March 1st to April 22nd, then saw what happened to them through May 22nd. Since they were looking back, and treatment decisions were up to individual doctors, this was a retrospective uncontrolled study, pretty weak in the eyes of science types. Still, what they found was pretty interesting.

Among 1274 outpatients with documented COVID infection 7.6% were prescribed hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil). In a 1067 patient propensity matched cohort, 21.6% with outpatient exposure to Plaquenil were hospitalized, and 31.4% without exposure were hospitalized. Propensity score matching is a quasi-experimental method in which the researcher uses statistical techniques to construct an artificial control group by matching each treated patient with a non-treated patient having similar characteristics. Using these matches, the researcher can estimate the impact of an intervention. So using these stats, they showed that the reduced rate of hospitalization for the patients who received Plaquenil was statistically significant. It looks even better graphically

Looks like something you might wanna take if your COVID test comes back positive, eh? The stuff is very safe, especially in short term, and quite cheap. I used to prescribe it by the buckets full to patients with mild rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, and those treatment courses were long term. Except for having to see an eye doctor annually (Plaquenil can build up in the retina long term), patients didn’t run into trouble as long as we minded the dose, adjusting for body weight. Controlled studies have shown Plaquenil doesn’t have much of an effect on COVID patients who are already quite sick and in the hospital, or in protecting health care workers at high risk of exposure from getting it themselves. President Trump was taking Plaquenil when he came down with COVID, but he had a pretty mild course, and maybe that was the Plaquenil in part (although most who catch COVID have a pretty mild course).

None of our betters seemed to like Plaquenil very much, although that opposition is being quietly rolled back, like the AMA’s cave last month https://wordpress.com/post/theviewfromharbal.com/899. Who knows how many could have been saved from the hospital or maybe even from death had more liberal use of Plaquenil been the thing from the get go? Well, COVID is still with us and the vaccines aren’t going to do everything. If you’re unfortunate enough to test positive, do what they tell you to do on the TV adds: “ask your doctor”.

Here’s the reference. If you click on the link, you can see the paper itself, maybe print it out to have in your back pocket when you go to your doctor’s office.

*Ip, A., Ahn, J., Zhou, Y. et al. Hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of outpatients with mildly symptomatic COVID-19: a multi-center observational study. BMC Infect Dis 21, 72 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-021-05773-w

those vaccines I

I’ve been meaning for some time now to dive deep into the COVID vaccine literature and produce something intelligible for this blog. The process would help me understand as well. I’ve done a little, but have quite a ways to go before I. can say I understand the whole picture. But today, I answered a question from an old friend which made me realize I have learned something worth sharing already.

Wang (a.k.a.Ken Rambow) was the ace rocker of our class now builds beautiful custom guitars, He wrote me this morning with the following:

Hey Bob. I would like to seek your opinion on something. Some people are concerned about the vaccine because as it involves the RNA. Should I be concerned? Not sure you profess to be an expert on this but I bet you know more than than some, including me!

To which I responded:

Hey Wang

I may not be as much the expert on viruses as you are with guitars (can’t build one from scratch), but I’ll bet we’re on the same relative tier.  After undergrad at U of M while I was waiting to see if I’d get into med school, I went to grad school in microbiology for a year and got a masters.  Beside the classwork which included a couple courses focusing on viruses, I did research in 2 labs looking at different viruses, which were hot then as it was thought they might cause cancer and degenerative brain diseases.  I spent time in 2 more virology labs, one in med school and another as a rheumatology fellow.  I sucked at bench research, so I never published anything, but did learn the big words along the way, which has served me well over the past year.  I met Kathy as a collaborator on a project a Michigan, so it wasn’t all for naught. 

The vaccines are very interesting, and I keep meaning to dive into the topic completely and produce something for my blog, but that will have to wait, as some other people are expecting me to help them finish up a manuscript over the next 2 weeks.  But these vaccines are not the ones we knew as kids and young adults, when they either ground up the critter they wanted to protect you from and injected it or else somehow disabled the bugger and injected into you live but it didn’t make you sick.

The molecular biologists devised these RNA vaccines several years ago and have been dying for a chance to use them on a large scale.  Coronavirus is an RNA virus.  Your genes are DNA, which must be transcribed into RNA to be translated on ribosomes to make proteins.  The virus skips that first step, injects RNA into your cells and goes to town using your own ribosomes.   There is one component of Mr. corona that is critical to its ability to wreak havoc: the spike protein.  You’ve seen many pictures of it.  This protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on lung cells, enters those cells, and goes to town.  Just injecting you with spike protein won’t protect you from corona, as it elicits mainly antibodies, which the spike protein can co-opt by pretending to be a resting place for those antibodies, but that’s another story.  The lab jocks, with all their tools to manipulate DNA and RNA, have replicated the portion of the RNA gene of the coronavirus that makes spike protein.  They’ve encapsulated it in little packets (nanoparticles) made of polyethylene glycol (ethylene glycol = antifreeze), which is what gets injected.  The stuff is very unstable, hence all the dry ice.  Once injected, it finds some friendly cells, latches onto their ribosomes, and starts cranking out spike protein.  Since this is recognized as foreign by your immune system, all arms of the immune system respond (not just the antibody producing cells).   The RNA eventually gets degraded (they say), so the spike protein production peters out.  The second shot gooses it up again.  So, it’s very effective.  Pfizer will make a killing (did you know they were making it in the old Upjohn plant on Portage?).  My worry is what happens from mucking with this basic stuff of life?  I guess I’ve seen Jurassic Park too many times.  All human cells contain a little bit of reverse transcriptase, which takes RNA and makes DNA, which can then, potentially, integrate into your own genes.  Vaccines coming down the pike employ different mechanisms, including one which takes an adenovirus bearing the spike protein onto its own DNA chromosome, which infects your cells, where I think the spike protein gene actually does integrate into your own genes so it can crank out spike protein.  Need to read more about that.

Bottom line is these things are wonderful and scary at the same time, barring Bill Gates’ bots and the luciferase.  If you’re in a situation where you’re going to be encountering a lot of people that might be infected with COVID, like a hospital ER, maybe it’s worth getting.  Kathy and I intend to stay as far away from them as possible, unless having had it becomes some sort of requirement to travel.   Remember how Prof. Carlin taught you there are more ways to protect yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo

Stay well

Bob

50 years

Since last July, when the planned 50th reunion celebration for the Vicksburg High School class of 1970 got nixed because COVID, I’ve been setting up Zoom meetings for those classmates of mine with an e-mail address. Initially, I found only 60 or so of those out of our class of 169, but we’d had several meet ups where a small fraction of those showed up and had a pretty good time. Once you get over the shock of who all those old people might be, as you get to talking the bonds reform. Today I was working to set one up for next week, as it had been since well before Christmas that we’ve Zoomed. I’ve found over the last couple months that many of the folks without a single email address actually have many, at least on my InstantCheckmate search. Firing off an email to a batch can return the one that works and off you go. One connection I made was with Jo Ann Martens Cousins in Jupiter Florida, one of the brighter and livelier members of our class. I was happy when she responded and she’ll surely light up the Zoom screen. She asked me for contact information on a couple class members, which I supplied, then asked the following. I’d already sent her a current picture of me so she wouldn’t be too shocked when she logged on for the Zoom. She asked:

So what have you been doing these last 50 years…catch me up … would love to get  caught up… where are you…family…job  or retired?? 

I answered:

About Jr yr @ U of M figured I had to do something productive, had always done well in science, so aimed for med school.  got the folks off my back.  had a year to kill before possible med school, so got a masters in microbiology.  did research in virology and dabbled in it again in med school and post-doc.  Knowing that lingo has served me well this past year.  Only school I got into was University of Chicago, a good one.  Hard slog, but matched to another good place (Barnes Hospital, St.Louis) for internal medicine.  Came back to AA – the only program that would have me – for Rheumatology.  An endless game of clue as my wife observed.  Met her as a collaborator on a virology project.   Married 10/4/86 (remember Maxwell Smart?).  No kids despite trying.  Still living in the first house I bought in ’85, now at last paid for.  Hired on to faculty after my post-doc, got tenured ’94 so I got to stay.  Kathy finally got PhD 4 years after we married, did a couple post-docs, hired on to the U as a research scientist.  Adapted some of her research to effects of spaceflight.  NASA noticed and hired her as one of their senior scientists ’88, responsible for the space station first 2 years then human space flight next 2.  Worked and lived in DC.  Not fun for me except when I went to visit.  She applied to astronaut corps and made first cut but stopped there.  Dad came to AA regularly for football games (Kathy brought great 50 yard line season tickets that had been in her family since ’64) and we had great times.  He died March ’03 after 9 years with metastatic colon cancer.  My Aunt Dorie, sister of my mom who died when I was 10, died later that year.  In ’09, I successfully looked up my birth parents and went from being an orphaned only child to one with 2 living parents and 10 half-brothers and sisters (3/7).  Birth father, who played football at MSU for Biggie Munn, died ’15 and one of his daughters passed from non-smokers’ lung cancer 2 years ago.  Fortunately, we all get along and no one has asked me for money.

I never made “fool” professor, retiring as associate professor 6/30/19.  Retirement is great.  So many things you don’t or can’t do while working, or maybe never even thought of.   There’s not enough time in the day to do all the things I’d like to do now.  Now I know why old people get up so early.  Kathy has taught scientific writing in her old school (Kinesiology) for the last 11 years and counting.  She loves it, but didn’t like having to go virtual, even though it kept her at home in the living room with me.  She says she’s hanging it up after this term, but I have my doubts.  She loves those kids too much.  This term she’s back to getting to teach mostly in person.  And someone bringing in a paycheck is nice.  We already travel a lot, even in the face of COVID.  Eric Durham’s still my best friend, but his grandkids get most of his attention.  I’ve been keeping in touch with some of the old VHS gang for quite a while.  Best friends I ever had.  About a year ago, I took on a project that has me going to the ‘burg periodically for more than just frivolous reasons.  Early into it, I got to interacting with Sue Moore, Meredith Clark’s daughter, who got so interested in what I was doing wrote me up for her South County News, successor to the Commercial.  I’ve attached her story.  Sadly, she died a month later.

Well, that’s probably enough news from Lake Wobegon for now.  If you want more of my words, you can check out my blog http://www.theviewfromharbal.com.  I’ve loaded a bunch of pictures onto my classmates.com page https://www.classmates.com/siteui/people/robert-ike/5513161.

Thanks for asking.

See you next week

Bob

Aunt Dorie

How sad and hard it is to write about someone who’s been so important to you.  I’ll have to say Aunt Dorie began for me as the baby daughter of Bill and Vera, my mom Marion the star to rise and snatch Dick, who would be my dad. 

Doris, as the less marriageable, was off to Mercy College nursing school.  She excelled, if not to honors. Shortly into her rotations at St. Mary’s, she was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, mandating a stay at the sanitarium till ’51.  Once out, she took a post in the Kalamazoo State (Psychiatric) Hospital, where she would toil till an old friend of hers recommended she enroll in Wayne State to acquire a proper degree, which she did, parlaying it into a faculty position she’d occupy, including chair of her department, until she finally retired . During these times she managed to find ways to spoil me rotten.   While I lived in Birmingham ’61-’63. A trip down to her Royal Oak home was pretty easy, but when I returned my dad said “it took two weeks to wring it all out of her.”  She sent me regular packages of cookies and cashews while in medical school, plus checks.  All she wanted were some updates on my progress, which I sent her, sporadically.  Ecstatic I’d be back in Ann Arbor, we got together pretty regular.  It helped I was chasing Nancy of Farmington Hills, whom they all liked.  As my affections turned to this Kathy chick, our mutual affections faded.   Of course there have been a few back and forth meetings, but we’ve approached these meeting more as an obligation.  Alas, she’s gone now, dying on Halloween night October ’03.  She always enjoyed Halloween, with all the kids.  The neighborhood kids released balloons in her honor afterwards.  So that I might commit something to her honor.  Let this post be it

These days

Any boomer music stream, like Spotify, will eventually roll around  to play Jackson Browne’s “These days”,  a song he wrote at age 16 and made a hit in 1973 from  his second album, For Everyman.  Greg Allman had a big hand in the song’s arrangements.

Across the decades, it still weighs on the shoulders of retiring boomers like me.  How true it was after retirement “I’ve been out walking, I don’t do that much talking, these days”.  Then to the end comes the dagger to the heart: “Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them”.  Unfortunately for JB’s version, he fades out with some heavy rock rifts, not letting this sentiment rest.  Tom Rush’s much gentler treatment is my preference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TjqOqy4MpM

So this song is as hard to avoid as something by Bob Seger.  When it comes on I always retreat to that contemplative state.  Even though I’ve finally escaped from the morose grip of this tune, “please don’t confront me with my failures” always stabs me to the heart.  Thank you, Jackson, for always keeping me in touch with my feelings and remembering what is real.

dying spies

‘Tis a sad time when the few remaining pommes from that peck of Northern spies you bought at the farmers’ market now rot in your fruit bowl.  The daily apple to keep the doctor away never materialized, and a few great desserts used up most of ‘em.  But there is one last mission to which a spy apple might apply itself: glühwein, the magnificent spiced wine our German friends offer every Christmas,  at Christkindlmarkt, if you’re so blessed to have one near you.  Even our beloved Chicago market has gone virtual this year, so we’re on our own to capture the charms of the experience.  While we can’t recapture the charms of the markets, we have one weapon in our disposal:  access to a well stocked spice rack and to a proper German red wine (usually a vanishingly small segment of your wine store’s stocks) and you too can dribble out that wonderful concoction.  Works best in a crock pot, but a pot on a low stove would work.  You’ll need a big navel orange you can zest and then section, and a lemon, plus that apple, but all else is smallball.

Here’s the recipe we’ve devised.  This is a serious glühwein recipe.  Look up all others and you will see gaps.

kathy and bob’s glühwein

2 X 750 mL bottles German red wine      ginger root, 1”X1”, sliced thin

¼ C honey                                             juniper berries, ½ t       

1 orange: zest & sections (1/3ds)           nutmeg, ½ t     

1 lemon: zest & juice                             vanilla bean, 1, chopped ¾” pieces

1 spy apple, cored, sectioned (1/3ds)

allspice, 9 berries                                  place spices in cloth mesh bag (e.g

star anise, 4 pods                                      cheesecloth)

bay leaf, 1                                             place spice bag, fruits, wine & honey

cardamon pods, 2 T                                   into crock pot

dried red chilis, 4                                  cook on high X 60’, then reduce to

cinnamon sticks, 8                                      low

whole cloves, 12                                   ladle into appropriate cups, including

coriander, ½ t                                              fruit.  serve warm

fenegreek ½ t      

fennel seeds, 1 t

find an appropriate German red wine to make it with

Here’s a list of possibilities:

Dornfelder

Pinot Noir

Trollinger

Regent

Valpolicella

Barbolino

Lemberger

Merlot

Montepulciano

Zweigelt

We’ve discovered a Michigan wine that works very well:  Left Foot Charley’s Blaufränkisch.  We like supporting Michigan business as we sip away.  We have one remaining spy, so another crock pot of glühwein seems in the offing.  Hate to let those apples go to waste.

It’s in a different culture, but one close to ours (we’re both at least 25% Norwegian) sköl!

We have our recipe into a nice little 3X5 card

London Calling

It’s remarkable how fast things can happen on a whim.   I get a regular nudge on my e-mail from BestClassicBands.com.  Always entertaining stuff immersing me in the music of my boomer past.   A recent offering of forgotten hits of the British Invasion included a hit by one young Jonathon King “Everyone’s gone to the moon” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ks2TPPyho. A melodic but melancholy offering, it was included in the songs carried on Apollo 11.  So it made it to the moon. I never knew he was a dead ringer for the high-school version of me.

Mr King was wildly successful in pop music, writing “Hooked on a feeling” but spent a few years in the slammer for some time he spent with adolescent boys.  Too bad.

But back to the whim, came on today a clip of Eric Clapton with Derek and the Dominos in Johnny Cash’s TV show in 1970.  https://bestclassicbands.com/derek-dominos-johnny-cash-6-18-16666/.  After Eric got off a soulful “She’s gone”, Johnny joins Eric and brings on Carl Perkins himself – bad toupée and all – to front the trio.  Wow, just wow.  Then as an aside, BestClassicBands mentions Eric’s 2021 tour, postponed from 2020.  Eric is one of those boomer rockers always alluding to his “last tour”, but he’s an ernst mensch, so maybe he means it.  An eager click finds no dates planned near Detroit.  In fact, the “tour” seems to be almost entirely in London, with 5 nights at the Royal Albert Hall (“how many holes it takes to fill?”), and dates in Prague and Amsterdam. Maybe more are forthcoming.  But Kathy and I couldn’t wait.  We scored VIP tickets, not far from the stage, for May 15th.   Don’t ask. Kathy will have wrapped up her teaching, maybe for good, and will deserve a little excursion.  From there, Mr. trip planner sprung into action.  We have an AirBnB in Kensington SW7, short walk to Royal Albert Hall and smack in the neighborhood where I whiled away 2 months of medical school in the winter of ’79 at the Brompton Hospital nearby and St. George’s Hospital, then at Hyde Park Corner, priciest piece of real estate in London and now site of a luxury hotel (the medical school is in now in Tooting SW 17, one district away from Wimbledon).  Last touch was airline tickets, for which Capital One was happy to discharge all my accumulated points to offset the there and back.

Of course, this is another COVID gamble.  Gotta figure things will be a little better by then.  I know for sure that Eric will want to go forth.  They used to write “Clapton is God” on the walls of his London performance venues.  If he has any of those powers remaining, I’ll know he’ll be pulling for us to be sitting in section M of Royal Albert Hall on May 15th to hear him play. “Lay down Sally”

Recipes

That’s what I’ve been doing this 10th day of Christmas, feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.  There’s the printed pages from Food and Wine that have to get into their sleeves in my ring binders and all those 3X 5 cards I’ve made of new and less legible recipes I’ve had to file. Quite a few of the former, as we’re into a pretty creative stretch.   But the dive into the old recipe boxes is quite the dip into the old days.  There are recipes in the hand of mothers, aunts, grandparents and older sibs calling to us from the past about how to do things. As I try to create new recipe cards from their scribblings, I strive to keep their same folded up papers for the memories.  Kathy’s mom will forever tell us how to make her ice cream pumpkin pie and me my Aunt Dorie’s stew.  Tonight I’m going for braised lamb necks with garlic and fennel.  Nothing I think my predecessors would have cooked up, but something I think we’re savoring.  Praise all that has come before.  Bon appetit.