Was this a protest over poor ergonomics and uncomfortable seating? A statement about seat diversity or the lack thereof? Are these physical chairs “stand-ins” for department chairs in academia?? To answer these and other questions, I will refer you to the artist responsible for this 2024 Paris installation called “AVALANCHE,” Tadashi Kawamata.“Liberty Leading the People” (1830) by Eugene Delacroix commemorates the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled King Charles X.The chairs! The chairs! They’re EVERYWHERE!!”
“I like a good, dry wine Dry like Ludwig Wittgenstein”
— Your host
A bit of the old Ludwig “Non-von”… Archivists have recently uncovered an early unpublished Wittgenstein piece called “Tractatus Logico-Scatologicus” that includes hand-drawn doodle illustrations!
This story relates to events that occurred in Denver, CO on Sat Jan 11, 2020:
It was a call weekend for me. I worked in-hospital from 9am to 7pm. The pace was generally brisk and the food pretty bad in the cafeteria, which closed at about 2pm, so I had loaded up on snacks. A short time before this, I had started eating KIND bars — supposedly healthy, flavors like a candy bar, etc. All good. But that day I think I ate 4 or 5 of them, mostly in the afternoon. And it turns out that not all KIND bars are created equal, as some contain chicory root fiber while other don’t. Mine sure did. And it just so happened that on the same night my friend Bob and his wife were hosting a holiday party at their house. We arrived around 8pm. My intense gas pains arrived, sharply, at around 9pm. I didn’t figure it out until a few days later (Googling it at a stop light after work) that chicory root can have the adverse effect of extreme gaseousness! It was off the charts. Farts, farts and more farts. Farts that lasted 15-20 seconds or more. It was Fart-A-Thon 2020. Like having back-to-back colonoscopies. At one point I just sat on the toilet bowl and lazily expelled gas like a whale venting through its blowhole. It was comical (in hindsight) and almost musical. When I emerged, I kept crop-dusting like those old biplanes dropping DDT. As I was talking to one guy, with each sentence came a short involuntary burst of coliform cologne from my undercarriage, although I must say the odor was somewhat less than your standard issue blast (n of 1). But, Jesus the overall gas volume! Buyer, and bystanders, beware. Read the label. Limit your intake. Schedule an outdoor event. Bring a change of clothes. Stay home.
And come to think of it, we were never invited back.
I spent a year working at Denver Health, a public hospital in Denver, CO, before moving back east during the COVID-19 epidemic. The radiology offices were fairly spartan and we shared adjacent bathroom facilities with the house staff that included showers. These spaces were generally clean and sanitary, but there was one unusual situation that I’ve depicted here. It concerns a certain green towel that was hanging in one of the bathroom/shower from late November 2019 until Feb 2020. The towel had already been hanging for about a week when I first took a photo on Nov 22, 2019…
Dec 9, 2019
Several weeks later on Dec 9, 2019, the towel was in the same position but with the addition of a partially deployed roll of toilet paper resting atop. The appearance now suggests a floating, ghost-like figure with some sort of dangling headdress, if you’ll allow…
Dec 19, 2019
Ten days on from that and no major changes noted. There was no discernible smell beyond the usual that I recall (let’s just assume the trail of white material on the wall to our left was outside the FOV on most other images, as it is visible on Feb 6). It did have me wondering whether any specific housekeeping policies might be in place to address an abandoned towel. If so, it would likely involve the wearing of gloves upon removal…
Jan 7, 2020
It’s a new year and now we’re over six weeks into the towel’s “residency.” We notice an alteration — the dangling stretch of tissue paper is no longer evident although the loose wrapping suggests a possible hasty re-wrap versus a displacement with tear-off and then a return to position. This is speculative. The towel itself meanwhile has undergone only subtle shifts in its geometry and has probably remained on the hook for the duration…
Jan 17, 2020
Ah-ha! At the two-month mark, we are back to baseline as the toilet roll has been removed. Note the indentation left by the roll near the towel’s apex. One senses, without touching, that it has a certain coarse stiffness (rigor towelis)…
Feb 3, 2020
Heading into Feb 2020 at status quo with only a partial subsidence of the apex indentation…
Feb 4, 2020
Whoa! Big changes afoot. The towel has been shifted to the left hook and we see a used yellow surgical mask (it perhaps a fateful portent of the nascent COVID epidemic that subsequently blossomed in March 2020) has replaced it on the right hook. But wait. A bias had been introduced! I had finally shared my little photo project with one of the radiology residents, and he later copped to being the architect of the change. This case therefore holds a major lesson about the integrity of scientific research and our fiduciary responsibilities as investigators to minimize bias and conflicts of interest (Disclosure: this project was made possible by funding from both CLOROX and TINACTIN)…
Feb 6, 2020
Alas. Not sure if our green towel was taken home, tossed out, or maybe it walked away on its own. But as George Harrison put it, “all things must pass.” It was quite a run.
March 28, 2020
There was no return of the infamous green towel but one of the house staff did leave behind a relic of the bygone days of medicine: a stethoscope. About as useful these days as mercury was in treating syphilis prior to Penicillin. The auscultatory device has been replaced, along with many time-honored skills in clinical diagnosis, by the CT scanner. This particular specimen was passed along to the Smithsonian Institute for posterity.
“I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks, ‘or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?’ To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
— David sedaris on undecided voters in the trump era
Turns out more than half the passengers ordered the shit platter. We are taxiing for take-off on what promises to be another colossal Trump failure, POTUS 2.0. That menacing clown will, yet again, crash it all down. Sadly in this venture, Trump “steaks” are also our stakes.
I’d call it “The Headless Statesman.” Wax statue of Abraham Lincoln, by artist Sandy Williams IV, melted in the severe summer heat of Washington, DC (GETTY IMAGES, June 2024). This is how my head feels today after we re-elected a vile, soulless, anti-democratic sociopath to our highest office. Donald Trump, the HEEDLESS Statesman. Well done, America, you fucking BOZO!!
It’s impossible to overstate the distaste I have for the American electorate right now. All of our guardrails have utterly failed in preventing this felonious, self-dealing, deranged, soul-rotted, maggot-brained sexual abuser from re-entering the White House. There are so many moral cowards and enablers who share this blame that I haven’t the time nor space to name them all: the heavily partisan and plainly unethical SCOTUS majority providing cover and delaying legitimate legal cases against him — along with other Trump-appointed bench lackeys like Aileen Cannon ; Mitch “Machiavelli” McConnell and his gang of political brigands including Lindsey Graham, Mike Johnson, and Marco Rubio, just to name a few (it’s power at any cost for these mediocre supplicating weasels); the mendacious/alarmist right-wing press of FOX and Murdock and Elon Musk (via X) and fellow-traveler douchebags like Joe Rogan who whitewash the blood and bile from Trump’s faux orange skin. The list goes on and on…
But finally it was the goalkeeping electorate who fell down. They watched the original screen version of Trump 1.0 in full Technicolor, Sensurround, and Smell-O-Vision and have now said, “Sequel, please!” They heard all the lies, the smears, the taunts, the threats, the illogic, the misinformation, the lack of historical knowledge, the absence of decorum and civility, the lack of empathy, the selective outrage, the corrosion of our vital institutions, etc., etc.,… and still pressed the Trump button. Yes, there were some prominent voices on the Right who spoke against the dangers, but they were all too few, said way too little, and came well too late. The best chance to finish off his sordid political career, surely, was at the second impeachment trial over the Jan 6 insurrection. But the spineless Republicans in the Senate collapsed under the weight of their moral and political responsibility, most likely out of fear of Trump’s base. And now we the voters, having been collectively riveted by the unhinged Trump attempt to subvert an election (while he himself cheered on the violence perpetrated on our Capitol by his own followers) based on a pure fabrication of voter fraud, have decided to give him a full 4-year do-over (no doubt the notorious golf cheat, with a supposed single-digit handicap, takes unlimited mulligans). And maybe that gets to the heart of the matter: what too many Americans crave is an entertaining political conflict, one with the frisson of violence, that rolls from town to town like professional wrestling/UFC. They want blood sport, not nuanced policy debate. Trump gives them that version of escapism on steroids and HGH, even if he’s cynically undermining their own interests in the process. And they also find Trump somehow “funny” with his malicious slurs and belittling nicknames (that, in the manner of all bullies, are far more accurate when pointed straight back at him). They literally and figuratively want their own “Gladiator” (Trump in this analogy, of course, runs much closer to the evil character of Commodus). Well perhaps his timing couldn’t be any better because, coming soon to your local theater, is “Gladiator II.”
Great Exudations 