London Calling

Bloody England.

As some of you might have already read over at Gwen's more expeditiously updated blog, we just got back from a fun and surprisingly sunny four day trip to London, England. Despite being raped by the low dollar time and time again (estimated cost of our four day trip: about 34,000 dollars give or take), we still managed to have a good time. As with any great city of the world, London seems to live up to its billing, sassy Wank-uhs strolling around and all.

We flew out Friday morning, arriving at moderately distant Stansed Airpport - a nice little venue for a cheap flight by the way - and then trained into the city to wheel and deal and stick it to the lymies.

We sat down to lunch at a relatively fancy Indian place replete with a power business lunch crew (and us). The food was good though the total price was steep, about 70 pounds or 4,000 dollars. (Yes I'm going to make that weak dollar joke over and over again. I made it all weekend, why stop now?) After lunch, it was over to Westminster Abbey to stroll around and marvel at the famous people buried there. And after that it was a quick stroll to Big Ben and Parliament. (Estimated number of times I belted out the "Big Ben, Parliament Kids! I cannot get left!" line from European Vacation: ~ 235)



Big Ben, Parliament Kids!


We cruised down the river a bit at that point and stumbled on a pretty sweet Battle of Britain memorial which I proceeded to admire and then of course mock extensively by trying to frame multiple "Jackass" pictures - my trademark. You can see one result here and the others in the photo log.



Scramble Boys! We got an Air Raid comin', we do!



Following the photo shoot we went off on the train to Gwen's aunt's (Diane's) house, where we stayed each night. This was huge for us - for multiple reasons. First, it let Gwen ("Wendy") catch up with her aunt. Second, it saved us a LOT of money (estimated savings for three nights in London: 12,457 dollars). Third, it gave us exposure to a friendly local in the form of Michael, Gwen's uncle, who was quite pleasant. (More about him and the Brits in general later in the post.)

We ate Shepherd's Pie - a traditional English meal - that night. Despite the fact that it was a traditional English meal, it turned out to actually be pretty good. Also Michael was quite the proficient home brewer, so he managed to get us pretty looped that first night on home-brewed beer and cider while we traded comments on Americans and British in general.

On Saturday we ventured out into some beautiful and atypical British weather. We had lunch at a good Japanese place (the key to eating in London is to eat everything BUT British food - the aforementioned Shepherd's Pie excluded) and then met up with old friend Margie (see earlier posts, pics, i.e Chamonix) for a day at the Tower of London. Forgoing a tour with the Beefeater guides (too crowded), we spent several hours with an audio guide. The Tower is famous, a command post and prison (as well as place of execution) of old for Victorian England. It has its share of notorious stories of course, and further highlighted one of the coolest features of visiting European cities in general - the extensive history therein. It also houses the Crown Jewels of State, which are fairly impressive.

After the Tower we headed out toward dinner, stopping off first at a bar to have a round of drinks. Three drinks at the place we chose cost 25 pounds, or FIFTY DOLLARS! (No exaggeration here). Don't believe me? Here's a picture of the receipt.



London - Dirt Cheap


On Sunday Gwen and I headed out, on Michael's recommendation, to the "Imperial War Museum", which might be the best title of a museum EVER. This museum specialized in World War I and II memorabilia, and was phenomenal. Full-sized authentic vehicles abounded, plus endless exhibits of both the great world wars. Gwen and I spent nearly three hours in said museum (mostly at my urging), and we barely even touched World War I (other than this neat part where you walk through a mock-up "trench" while mannequins and recordings simulate the experience). There was also a Holocaust exhibit on one of the floors which took a while and was pretty solid. As always with those things, it was pretty sobering. Not sure why I like those exhibits so much, they are horrifying but mesmerizing. Unreal. One of the most powerful things they had there were lots of videos, several with new "colorizations". The result, going from black and white, to color, is pretty staggering - it just hammers home that the events were closer in time than we realize. Powerful stuff. I'll go out a limb here and say it - the holocaust sucked.




Do not 'Eff' with the Imperial War Museum

After the "Imperial War Museum" we headed off to the National Gallery to look upon fine art by the likes of Da Vinci, Van Gogh, and others. Not too shabby.

We headed back to Michael and Diane's at that point to join them again for dinner and home brew. Monday morning we were up and off to the city again, then the airport and then home. On the way to London the last time, I snapped the shot below of the power factory which is the cover of the Pink Floyd Album "Animals" which we had seen every day. Neat.





So London rocked and I'm adding it to my "list". I really enjoyed our time with Diane and Michael to get the perspective of both a local (Michael) and of an American-turned-local (Diane, who has been in London over fifteen years now). Diane's accent was can't win for her, British sounding to an American, and American sounding to a Brit.

The British are amusing. They tend to be very polite, and their speech, like that of the Irish, is mesmerizing. They seem to be into ending every sentence with a question. (i.e "It's a lovely day, inn't it") Plus they tend to slip in a lot of things under their breath and between sips of beer, etc, which are often quite comical. Michael was no exception.

Michael himself was a hell of a nice guy. He was a Britain-o-phile to the core, extolling the virtues of Britain at the expense of all else (best beer? British. best place to live? Britain, etc), but in an amusing way, kind of like my dad extols The Woodlands, Texas at the expense of all other places. Michael wasn't a huge "football" fan which I found odd, but when asked he said the Tatenham Hotspurs were his team. He was also a HUGE war buff (the Imperial War Museum was his recommendation) and proud to show off his impressive collection of war films. We talked extensively about the English take on World War I and (more interestingly) World War II, and I must say it was nice to leave a country where you have to walk on eggshells in regards to World War II and go to a place where you can hi-five an ally about how freakin' sweet we schooled the nazis. (Michael's take on the Germans: "A grouchy rule-following lot, aren't they?") So true, Michael. So true.

All in all, not a bad weekend.


Pics:

London 2008

Mr. Stup goes to Washington

I spent last week in Washington DC, at the annual ACP meeting.

It turns out that many thousand internists gather each year, not unlike druids, to attend lectures on the latest medical issues and network. I think I'm still too jet-lagged (just got back Monday) to go over in exhausting detail everything that happened during the week, but here's a brief recap of the highlights.

-I thought the conference was great. It really rejuvenated me intellectually and medically. I think, like in most jobs, doing the same sorts of things over and over again (and in my case having lumps of administrative crap dumped on top of it so that the percentage of actual medical care is relatively small) can result in the doldrums, or a working rut. (Guess where I am?) It was refreshing to go to medical lectures, be updated on the material (man does our thinking change more frequently than you'd think) from some of the field's big-wigs, and basically feel like a damn doctor again - rather than like an Army cog and administrator, which I feel like all too often currently. The whole thing sort of excited me about medicine again.

-In a similar vane the end is in sight, the end of my military career that is. In little over a year I will be like most people at the meeting, i.e wear civilian clothes, have adequate support staff, and not have to get my car inspected before I travel places on weekends because it's 'policy'. It seems almost too surreal to believe. I'm really looking forward to the civilian world. I don't even mind that I'll have to drop a small fortune on suitable work clothes, of which I have very few right now. (Apparently civilian MD's don't wear the Army Combat Uniform to work.)

-I had a great time catching up with people. Pete and I shared a room for the week, and we spent our nights dining, drinking and catching up with old friends, chief among them "Big" George ("I'm not your friend, buddy!") and other associated Madigan folks who are now at Walter Reed or who were in town for the conference. I also got the chance to see several old acquaintances from medical school and even Landstuhl (my old boss). Pete and I even got together with our Iraq buddy Steve for dinner one night, one of the other docs stationed with me at old FOB Falcon.

-Washington DC is for the most part a great town. Good food, good scenery, good sense of history. The traffic really is miserable, however, and Pete and I spent our fair share of time in it going to and from the conference in our shuttle. Luckily the Metro is a really solid way to get around and beat the gridlock. Pete and I saw a good chunk of the city and the surrounding areas during our week. We also went out running one day, doing a "monument tour" on the Mall, running from one place to the next, starting at the Lincoln Memorial and making our way to the Capitol building and then back to the hotel. I maintain that the Vietnam Memorial is the best of the bunch (though admittedly I didn't get a chance to see the Korean War Memorial which is supposed to be cool) - it's so understated and powerful - really good stuff. As I walked through it this time I couldn't clear the thought that some day there will be an Iraq War Memorial somewhere and that, if like "the Wall", they print out all the names of the casualties, then I will recognize several on the list. A sobering thought.

-Got to eat sushi twice. Most of you have no idea how huge that is for me. (Damn I need sushi back in my life...)

-Unfortunately I didn't get many pictures from the week. Perhaps I'll post the few I have at a later date. I'm too lazy to do it now.


And that's that. It was a great week. A refreshing re-look at medicine, a chance to see old friends, and a good break from work in the process. Thumbs up. Next up is London this weekend, and then after that - back to Croatia. Summer travel season is definitely heating up.

"Twisting the Strangle Grip won't Give no Mercy!"

How can you not love a band with THIS as one of its album covers?



The first important thing to realize is that as I write this post I'm rocking out to Judas Priest.

The second important thing to realize is that I've had a true rock resurgence of late. And that includes Metal.

I think it started over a month ago when I re-stumbled over the song "Disposable Heroes" by Metallica. I was at the gym with my iPOD, randomly flipping through songs, looking for something to whale on my pecs to, and lo and behold "Heroes" is what the fateful iPOD shuffler delivered. Energized, I threw some iron around while Hetfield barked his lyrics and thought - this song effing rocks!

Which got me thinking. I used to love Metallica (prior to souring on them because of how lame they appeared during the Napster debacle - also their music got significantly lamer after the "Metallica" album. That said, back in high school they put on the best concert I've ever seen, period.) and an assortment of other hard and heavy bands back in my middle school and high school days, even into college somewhat. I owned the big four Metallica albums (Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, And Justice for All) and several other hard rock and metal albums of the day.

I started diving back into my older Metallica stuff, then went and found some Megadeth, and of course by that point I was too far in to consider not unleashing the inimitable Judas Priest. Priest was my favorites back in the day - back when I dreamed of being a long haired rocker. (Rob Halford's voice can easily kill a man.) And now, they've resurfaced again and have to come to dominate my iPOD the last several weeks.

All this got me to thinking that I haven't really added any new music to my life in a while. The last time I had a solid influx of music was when I was in Iraq. I ordered an iPOD and sent it to Eryn. I had him put a bunch of stuff on it - all kinds of music - and then he sent it out to me in the desert. From that experience I picked up on some new bands (chiefly Electric Six, but many more as well). Since, however, not a whole lot of new stuff has filtered across my radar. That has changed in the last few weeks.

Helping the situation was a several hundred dollar credit card surplus (automatic standing payments plus few recent purchases). I took one look at that and thought, what the hell? Next thing I know I've ordered about 25-30 CD's off of Amazon to upgrade my musical collection and try some new stuff out. I repurchased pretty much every CD in the Judas Priest discography (I had most them on cassette before), skipping the two albums which didn't have Rob Halford at the front (what's the point?).



And since, I've been bringing my iPOD everywhere, rocking out at work, in the car, in between patients in the clinic, and after work when I'm finishing notes and other administrative crap. I've been turning my office at Landstuhl into Headbanger's Ball.

To top it off, I searched for "Judas Priest Concert info" one day on a lark and it turns out they're touring Europe in the next few months and so now after a few more clicks I have tickets to go see them in Luxembourg in June. Rob Halford and I in the same vicinity? Bliss. (If you've never had Halford's four-and-a-half octave falsetto melt your face off, then my apologies but you've missed out. See the 24 second mark of the video blow to see what I mean...)



Your Life Changes in 24 seconds


So things have been straight rockin' around here for a few weeks, and with more CD's on the way, should only continue to do so.

Here's a couple of quick recommendations from my recent findings:

-Judas Priest: Painkiller (Quintessential Speed Metal Album - will revitalize your work out - and your life)

-Metallica: Master of Puppets (Possibly best Metal album of all time)

-The National: Boxer (Much more mellow and not really in the hard rock/metal category but utterly phenomenal; I bought this on iTunes on a tip from Paul Shirley at espn.com and haven't regretted it at all)

I also bought a bunch of classic rock albums which haven't arrived yet - The Who, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Van Halen, etc. It might just be time to start growing my hair out...


In other new the weather here in Germany is starting to get really good. Spring is out, shaking off the chills of winter, and sunlight remains until clear after 9 pm already. Though unfortunately stuck on call for this beautiful weekend, we had another great set of days last weekend. Last Saturday Pete and I fired up the old mountain bikes and found a great trail about a half hour away, taking advantage of Germany's beautiful scenery which is not unlike Washington's in some ways. Good to be back on the bike again.

Last Saturday night we had a little 'draft party' for the NFL draft. We watched the first round, which though shortened this year still took ridiculously long. I've never really watched the draft before, in the past I had mostly followed it. This year, however, we thought what the hell and threw it on for a few hours over beers and chips. It's funny just how addicted everyone is to the NFL these days - I mean here we are watching the draft. Not only that, but there were EIGHT motherluvin' analysts covering this event for ESPN. There was a main table, headed by the immortal Berman, with five people, and then a satellite table with three more analysts. Good God.

The best moment of the draft for me, other than the constant analysis of Mel Kiper's hair, was when Kansas City picked guard Branden Albert with the 15th overall pick in the draft. Albert is 6'5" and weighs in at 310 pounds, but when they showed him on his couch at home surrounded by his family I swear he looked like a scat back. He was the smallest one on the couch! It was hilarious. The whole couch erupted with laughter and we were thinking maybe some of his aunts and uncles could be drafted by other teams to help stuff the run. We were in stitches for about ten minutes over this. Ah, obesity - it's fun!

In terms of the (WORLD CHAMPION) G-men, I thought they did OK in the draft as far as I'm concerned. Reese did such a good job last year that he gets a free pass in my eyes anyway. We'll see what happens.

The other big doing lately is that Landstuhl Hospital just finished (and passed) it's inspection by JCAHO last week. The "Joint Commission", as it's known, is an administrative body (and more or less a money-making racket as I see it) that gives accreditation to hospitals. The lead in to such an inspection is such a frenzied spectacle that it's both annoying and hilarious. As I see it, administrative nonsense is always threatening to dominate medicine and actual patient care, and never is that more evident than when one of these "inspections" occurs. Forget the actual care of the patients, just make sure you document in triplicate everything related to what you discussed with the patients - that's the most important thing.

To put it in Star Wars terms (always a good move), the hospital is like the second Death Star and the JCAHO inspection is like the Emperor coming for a visit. We all had to double our efforts, be on our best behavior, and despite our "Business as Usual!" motto, things were anything but last week. It just makes me shake my head.

Thankfully, I had only a small part in the actual inspection, and that related to my role with our inpatient computer system. I was called to a ward one day to help answer questions about our new system. I arrived to find the inspector flanked by full bird Colonels, like an entourage. The inspector was nice enough, but the whole sight was just ridiculous. An utter circus. I'm glad it's over, and thankfully my trachea wasn't crushed.





A good Summary of the JCAHO visit