Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/02/09

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, January 2, 2009

To Whet Your Appetite

I'm not much of a foodie, but I enjoy reading about food. So I've added to my blogroll -- A Few Good Sites -- over there two links to culinary sites maintained by a couple of friends and former colleagues: Aleta Watson's The Skillet Chronicles and Carolyn Jung's Foodgal. Both are treats.

Going Green

I'm not much of an environmentalist, I'm afraid. Oh, I insist on fluorescent bulbs, but I sometimes forget and throw paper or bottles into the trash instead of the recycling bin, and I can never remember what I'm supposed to do with the little dead batteries from the remote. But my stay in a couple of medical institutions shocked me. Every day, I watch several yards of plastic tubing and three or four little syringes tossed into the waste bin after my infusion. Not to mention the disposable gloves that the nurses pull on and toss after each procedure, even the ones that take only a few seconds.

I know there are perfectly good reasons for all this waste, but in a big hospital like Stanford it must be prodigious. What happens to all that stuff? Is it dumped? Incinerated? Or somehow purged of its previous uses and recycled? None of those alternatives is particularly attractive. And the energy costs of running all that equipment must be astronomical. (Is there a fresher word than "astronomical"? Cosmic? Galactic?)

In an age when we're all being urged to turn down our thermostats and recycle and drive less, it seems like the hospitals are exempt. Maybe that's how it should be -- I certainly don't want to get my meds through an IV line somebody else has used before me -- but I wonder how conscientious hospital management is being encouraged to be.