Monday, April 27, 2009
End of the Line for Pontiac
GM announced today that the Pontiac brand will be eliminated. This has been rumored for a while so it isn't a surprise, but it's a little sad personally. My Uncle Art sold Pontiacs, and so a number of them have come through my life. These are the four that I got to drive:
First was the Ventura that my had starting in the mid-1970s. It looked like this.
This image comes from here.
Our Ventura had a straight six and an automatic transmission. The car was surprisingly slow and heavy for its size, and not much fun to drive as I remember. It was also a horrifying putty color, like the one in the photo. I got in my first crash in this car, rear-ending a big old Lincoln on Second Street in Hayward. I was 17 or 18, and the crash was entirely my fault; how embarrassing. Fortunately we weren't going fast. The Lincoln sustained almost no damage, but the front of the Pontiac was creamed.
Second, my uncle (or maybe by that point my cousin Dale) loaned me a Trans Am for a week following high school graduation. Maybe he thought I was going to take my meager scholarship money and put it down on the car; fat chance. It was a black car with gold trim, looking exactly like this.
This image comes from here.
It was a fast and fun car, but I was not a fast or fun driver. What I remember most about the car, of all things, was the dashboard -- it was about a mile wide, smooth and flat, black. You could fry an egg on it on a sunny day. I was relieved to go back to my beat-up Toyota Corolla after the week was up.
Third was the T-1000 my dad handed down to me. I read somewhere that this was the worst American car ever made, but it actually served our family pretty well. It looked more like this than I care to admit. (Sorry, that's a Flikr link and I can't embed the photo -- but click over if you dare.)
It got to be quite a rattletrap over the years, but the engine kept running in spite of all sorts of problems. (I remember a mechanic telling me that the car had an unkillable "Iron Duke" engine, but I'm not so sure.) I was driving it 20 miles each way to Sunset in the late 1980s and I remember that eventually my carpoolmate insisted on driving his car all the time; unstated, that was because he didn't trust the Pontiac or feel safe riding in it. My dad traded it in on his next Pontiac -- the TranSport below -- and my cousin Tom drove the T-1000 back and forth to Tahoe for years more, even when two of the four gears (manual transmission) didn't work. (I don't think reverse worked either at the end; I remember vaguely helping Tom push it out of a driveway after a family gathering.)
Finally, there was the magnificent Dustbuster.
See the full-sized image here.
My dad thought the Pontac TranSport was about the best-looking car ever made. To me it looked like the Space Shuttle in a funhouse mirror. But it was practical; we could carry lots of folks and lots of stuff in it. It sat up high, so you had a good view. When I co-chaired the Speakers' Bureau at CSUEB (we brought speakers to the university for talks and debates) I borrowed the Dustbuster to pick up VIPs at the airport. And, of course, the vehicle was made famous as the "Cadillac of Minivans" in Get Shorty.
First was the Ventura that my had starting in the mid-1970s. It looked like this.
This image comes from here.
Our Ventura had a straight six and an automatic transmission. The car was surprisingly slow and heavy for its size, and not much fun to drive as I remember. It was also a horrifying putty color, like the one in the photo. I got in my first crash in this car, rear-ending a big old Lincoln on Second Street in Hayward. I was 17 or 18, and the crash was entirely my fault; how embarrassing. Fortunately we weren't going fast. The Lincoln sustained almost no damage, but the front of the Pontiac was creamed.
Second, my uncle (or maybe by that point my cousin Dale) loaned me a Trans Am for a week following high school graduation. Maybe he thought I was going to take my meager scholarship money and put it down on the car; fat chance. It was a black car with gold trim, looking exactly like this.
This image comes from here.
It was a fast and fun car, but I was not a fast or fun driver. What I remember most about the car, of all things, was the dashboard -- it was about a mile wide, smooth and flat, black. You could fry an egg on it on a sunny day. I was relieved to go back to my beat-up Toyota Corolla after the week was up.
Third was the T-1000 my dad handed down to me. I read somewhere that this was the worst American car ever made, but it actually served our family pretty well. It looked more like this than I care to admit. (Sorry, that's a Flikr link and I can't embed the photo -- but click over if you dare.)
It got to be quite a rattletrap over the years, but the engine kept running in spite of all sorts of problems. (I remember a mechanic telling me that the car had an unkillable "Iron Duke" engine, but I'm not so sure.) I was driving it 20 miles each way to Sunset in the late 1980s and I remember that eventually my carpoolmate insisted on driving his car all the time; unstated, that was because he didn't trust the Pontiac or feel safe riding in it. My dad traded it in on his next Pontiac -- the TranSport below -- and my cousin Tom drove the T-1000 back and forth to Tahoe for years more, even when two of the four gears (manual transmission) didn't work. (I don't think reverse worked either at the end; I remember vaguely helping Tom push it out of a driveway after a family gathering.)
Finally, there was the magnificent Dustbuster.
See the full-sized image here.
My dad thought the Pontac TranSport was about the best-looking car ever made. To me it looked like the Space Shuttle in a funhouse mirror. But it was practical; we could carry lots of folks and lots of stuff in it. It sat up high, so you had a good view. When I co-chaired the Speakers' Bureau at CSUEB (we brought speakers to the university for talks and debates) I borrowed the Dustbuster to pick up VIPs at the airport. And, of course, the vehicle was made famous as the "Cadillac of Minivans" in Get Shorty.
Labels: cars, personal history
Thursday, April 09, 2009
A Crabby Post
I don't know Craig Crossman, but he claims to be host of "the No. 1 daily national computer radio talk show, Computer America." I came across one of his articles, syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, on PhysOrg.com. This is the opening paragraph:
Holy moly. This reads like a basic copyediting test: "How many mistakes can you find in this paragraph?"
Has McClatchy fired all of its editors?
One of the really great computer applications is the ability to record audio and save it to a digital file. One of the more interesting recording applications these days are podcasts. Making a podcast is fairly straightforward. Besides the computer, all you basically need is the recording software and a microphone. As far as the recording software is concerned, deciding what program to use can be somewhat daunting in that there are so many titles available from which to choose.
Holy moly. This reads like a basic copyediting test: "How many mistakes can you find in this paragraph?"
Has McClatchy fired all of its editors?
Labels: language, media, technology, writing
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Doctors and Patients
An article in Monday's New York Times told about a radiologist who experimented with attaching a digital photograph of a patient (the outside of a patient, that is) to the patient's digital CT or MRI scans to see how doing so affected radiologists' interpretation of those scans. The abstract of his findings includes these results:
The Times article also implied that attaching a photo could have a similar effect on "pathologists and other doctors who rarely have contact with patients."
This reminded me of something that happened not long after Jane was first diagnosed with her brain tumor back in 1998. Our monthly support group at UC Davis Medical Center followed a format in which we'd alternate between open discussion one month (we called it "sharing") and a guest speaker the next. One month, the neuro-pathologist who had prepared Jane's initial pathology report -- a report that was quite dire in its prognosis -- was to be the speaker. (I'm embarrassed to admit I don't recall his name, but I remember that he looked like a guy who spent his days in a dark room performing experiments and looking through microscopes -- pale, rumpled, hunched.) We listened to his presentation, and learned a lot about how brain tumors were identified and classified. After the talk, Jane approached him, pathology report in hand.
Never a shrinking violet, she asked him to read and autograph the report. He was startled but polite; he looked at the report, looked at a very healthy and alert Jane, and said, "Clearly, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about." A huge smile broke across his face, and he autographed the report with a flourish.
We related this story a few times over the years, and the reaction was almost always the same. Our fellow travelers were happy that we had beaten the odds, proved the expert wrong, and got to tell him to his face. (One person was not amused, saying, "I would have sued his ass on the spot.")
I'm pretty certain that that pathologist learned as much that day as we did. By connecting a face, a personality, a person to that tiny "rat bite" of tissue on his microscope slide, he learned that his work exists in the context of real lives and that his words matter. This wouldn't mean that he should be overly optimistic in his reports, but it did mean that he had an obligation to be as precise, accurate, and honest as possible. It's a lesson that the radiologists in the above-mentioned study also seem to have learned.
All radiologists felt more empathy to the patients after seeing the photograph. The photographs revealed medical information such as suffering or physical signs of disease. Out of the 30 cases which were presented twice, in 80% the incidental findings were not reported when the photograph was omitted from the file. All radiologists involved reported that the addition of the photograph did not lengthen the duration of the examination, however did render the interpretation more meticulous. All recommended adopting this idea to routine practice.
The Times article also implied that attaching a photo could have a similar effect on "pathologists and other doctors who rarely have contact with patients."
This reminded me of something that happened not long after Jane was first diagnosed with her brain tumor back in 1998. Our monthly support group at UC Davis Medical Center followed a format in which we'd alternate between open discussion one month (we called it "sharing") and a guest speaker the next. One month, the neuro-pathologist who had prepared Jane's initial pathology report -- a report that was quite dire in its prognosis -- was to be the speaker. (I'm embarrassed to admit I don't recall his name, but I remember that he looked like a guy who spent his days in a dark room performing experiments and looking through microscopes -- pale, rumpled, hunched.) We listened to his presentation, and learned a lot about how brain tumors were identified and classified. After the talk, Jane approached him, pathology report in hand.
Never a shrinking violet, she asked him to read and autograph the report. He was startled but polite; he looked at the report, looked at a very healthy and alert Jane, and said, "Clearly, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about." A huge smile broke across his face, and he autographed the report with a flourish.
We related this story a few times over the years, and the reaction was almost always the same. Our fellow travelers were happy that we had beaten the odds, proved the expert wrong, and got to tell him to his face. (One person was not amused, saying, "I would have sued his ass on the spot.")
I'm pretty certain that that pathologist learned as much that day as we did. By connecting a face, a personality, a person to that tiny "rat bite" of tissue on his microscope slide, he learned that his work exists in the context of real lives and that his words matter. This wouldn't mean that he should be overly optimistic in his reports, but it did mean that he had an obligation to be as precise, accurate, and honest as possible. It's a lesson that the radiologists in the above-mentioned study also seem to have learned.
Labels: brain tumor, health, Jane, medicine, news, people, personal history, science, work
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Another reason to come to the SFBACC concert
I've been baking Madeleines for the reception after the Saturday concert in Alameda. I dipped a bunch in chocolate today.
Full concert details are here.
Full concert details are here.
Labels: art, food, fun, music, photography, singing
