Tag: local

UCI Medical School keeps getting better and better

Latest hoot: The two docs who head up their Cardiology Division are neither board certified nor California licensed.

May require bugmenot to read. Short version:

The men who run UCI’s cardiology program, Jagat Narula and Mani Vannan, have not been certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine either in internal medicine or in cardiology. Most cardiologists meet those prerequisites before setting up a practice.

In addition, neither Narula, the division chief, nor Vannan, the associate chief, have California medical licenses. They are among a small group of doctors who practice in the state under a legal provision intended to give universities flexibility in hiring professors temporarily. They are licensed in Pennsylvania.

good day.

Didn’t have to do much work. salome_st_john took me to dinner at Lido Diner for my birthday and I ate chicken fried snake steak. Went to D’s and saw changeng‘s holiday show including audience participation craziness as documented in the last entry. bruisedhips, klikitak, and the_angelmoroni were… …entertaining as a singing group.

I saw people I hadn’t seen in forever and met some nice new people. Hi there mcpino! Also, people I hadn’t seen happy for months were practically glowing, which was awesome.

There was a fair amount of Six Degrees of WTF as people from different bits of my life recognized each other. “Oh, he’s the one in the motorcycle crash picture!” etc. There was some high-quality storytelling also, including: the awkwardness of a first BDSM date; a sweaty guy who brought a scorpion into the coffeehouse today just sitting on his hand; Jonathan Richman; and other stuff I forgot.

There was a guy with long grey hair and a leather jacket and a pockmarked face and he looked exactly like Bob Forrest from Thelonious Monster if Bob had aged normally since 1985. I wonder.

Stuart played really well, including a version of the Twelve Days of Christmas that sounded like it was done by the Curse Pirate on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Now I’m having an ’01 Mondavi Merlot in my house that has the heater fixed finally. Life is good tonight.

Cultural notes from all over

Observations from tonight:

People going to an office Christmas party are well-dressed (but not flashy), carry one present each, and look incredibly nervous. I saw about 30 of them tonight. They were being jovial at each other with dead empty dread in their eyes.

The satellite-provided music at the brewpub tonight was eerily perfect for someone of my age and background. It was the greatest hits of college radio from 1984 to 1987. What kind of radio station plays Prefab Sprout’s “Appetite” and Shriekback’s “Everything that Rises must Converge” in the same set in 2005?

At the chain bookstore, where I did not buy a thing, they of course had the whole front of the place devoted to Christmas books. One chunk of bookshelf was entirely given over to… wait for it… Christmas Mysteries. What the FUCK? I’m not sure how things are in your family, but around here if someone got murdered Christmas week we’d call the whole thing off, even if a sharp-eyed local Christian ladies’ sewing club solved the whole thing by the morning of the 24th. Take the tinsel down so we can just stare blankly into space, shaking. We’ll make it up to the kids somehow.

One of the clerks was hugely overweight, so much so that he puffed a bit and walked with the gait of a man whose knees are badly damaged. He had to help a young couple who looked like Vanguard-bots and who were very upset that they couldn’t find some Christian book about the essence of love.

I was gazing at the sad array of self-help books, most of which have titles in the form Stop ________! or _______ no more!, where the blank can be filled in with your unwanted behavior or emotion of choice: Smoking, Loving Too Much, Checking Things Over And Over, Leaving The House Without Pants, Putting Beans In Your Nose, etc. They were arranged in sections: General Self-Help, Addiction & Recovery, Dating. Then I saw a section labeled “Oversize”. Hmm. Odd euphemism for fat people. Oh, maybe it was for people who were “Big ‘n’ Tall” and included the towering as well as the obese? Oh, DOH! It was just the oversize books. Time to go home, substitute. Brain no work good.