George Bernard Shaw

In a remarkable coincidence, four prominent men share a birthday on this day, June 26^th : George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, and Mick Jagger.  Let’s briefly consider these men, in the order of their birth, and the enormous impact they’ve had on modern society.

My favorite singer has had a really rough year or so. Ryan Adams is a soulful singer who honestly is a wreck in his personal life; it’s part of what makes his craft as moving as it is. Recently, he was #MeToo’d; a pretty devastating piece appeared in the New York Times about Ryans’ manipulation and cruelty towards women, including his ex-wife Mandy Moore. The Times reported,

Equal parts punk-rock folk hero and romantic troubadour, Adams, 44, has 16 albums and seven Grammy nominations to his name. He has overseen music by Willie Nelson, written a Tim McGraw hit and recorded with John Mayer.

Wilfredo Leon is widely considered to be the best volleyball player in the world. He is 6’8”, athletic, and explosive. He was born and raised in Cuba and has spoken of the difficulties of everyday life there. He had to work 8-12 hours per day, while not getting enough calories to train as an athlete after work. After a three-hour practice, if he wanted to bathe, he had to carry a bucket from his fourth-floor apartment to a nearby pond and back up to his apartment. He hurt his shoulder and was denied surgery. He finally left Cuba and is now the highest-paid volleyball player in the world.

And where did he emigrate to find freedom? Poland. For some reason, that makes me so happy. Isn’t it wonderful that there are places that have recovered from Communism? Formerly oppressed countries that are now free? Hungary is another example.  There are others.  Could Cuba be next?

Isn’t it wonderful that someone flees the misery of communism in Cuba, and finds happiness and prosperity in Poland? He has a wife and two kids, and says it is his greatest dream to win a gold medal for his country – Poland. He says this would be the greatest moment of his life. He loves his country and says so every chance he gets. And why would he not? Good for you, Wilfredo. And more importantly, good for you, Poland.

I received the following message on my phone a little after 8 o’clock this morning:

Emergency Alert

The Frozen movies are weird. On the one hand, Elsa’s “Yay me! Let my inhibitions go!” song–as she nearly destroys an entire country with an unnatural winter–is a terribly odd anthem for a character who’s supposed to be a heroic Disney princess.  And then there’s the metaphysics of Frozen 2, which is among the most poorly explained things in film history.  Was the voice some higher goddess form of Elsa, and what exactly would that mean anyway?  Or was it her mother, and if so why didn’t Elsa say, “Oh my gosh, hi Mom, it’s been so long”?  Or was it something else?

On the other hand, Anna is a good depiction of selfless love, and Olaf even more so.  Olaf is like Sam Gamgee, Neville Longbottom, and Ricochet’s @peterrobinson: He’s just the best.  And then there’s the good advice from that little Troll: “Do the next right thing.”

As I do every four years, I’ve spent the weekend watching countries I don’t care about play games I don’t care about.  It’s not as boring as it sounds, although it’s certainly, um, surreal.  I mean really, really weird.  I’ll try to explain with a few observations, in no particular order:

• Ping pong is a strange sport. Sorry; table tennis.  And in a development which surprised no one at all, the gold medal game will be between China and Japan.
• The American corporations who buy advertising time on the American TV stations to promote their products to Americans apparently believe that there are very, very few white people in America.
• Water polo looks brutal. I wouldn’t play that sport without a life preserver, a football helmet, and SCUBA gear.  Actually, I still wouldn’t play that sport.  Those people are nuts.
• Simone Biles may be the best athlete I’ve ever seen.
• I’d never seen dressage before. It’s a competition in which horses sort of prance around slowly, nearly dancing, while carrying a person wearing ridiculous clothes.  This is what happens when you give white people too much spare time and way too much money.  The longer I watched, the more I thought that perhaps wealth taxes aren’t such a terrible idea…
• The commercials are following today’s trend of featuring average-looking people, better to identify with their target audience or something. If there is a truly beautiful woman in an ad, she will be black.  And if there is somehow a truly beautiful white woman in one of these commercials, she will have a crew cut and a tattoo of a snake on her neck.
• I thought I had played badminton before. Apparently, I have not.  Holy crap.  It’s nearly violent.  And they’re not drinking beer while playing.
• It’s my understanding that most cities that host the Olympics lose money. Not always, but usually.  I wonder how the books look for Japan right now?  No fans at all.  Beautiful, enormous, brand-new stadiums, purpose-built for each individual sport, with 15,000 empty seats in every single one.  Restaurants and hotels are empty.  Zero ticket sales.  Can you even imagine how much money Japan is going to lose in this deal?  Oh my God.
• Since the Russian Olympic Team was found to have widespread egregious violations of drug policies over the past several Olympics, Russia was not permitted to participate in this Olympics. So the Russian athletes are participating as the “ROC”, or Russian Olympic Committee.  They don’t have a Russian flag on their uniforms.  That way, the athletes have not doped up steroid monsters now.  Much better.  I’m sure that the athletes from the other countries are glad that the Olympic Committee resolved that issue.  Whew.
• I can’t imagine working my entire life to have the opportunity to compete in the Olympics and then performing in front of empty, quiet stadiums. How heartbreaking.

All that adds up to a surreal viewing experience.  Watching sports I don’t know anything about, with athletes I’ve never heard of, with commercials that appear to be filmed for a foreign country, with announcers trying to build enthusiasm for games that nobody is watching in empty stadiums.  It is really weird.

Hilton Head is an odd place to practice medicine.  No one is from here.  They all spend their lives somewhere else (usually Midwest or Northeast) working hard enough to make enough money to retire in a place like Hilton Head.  Then they move down here and begin their long-anticipated life of leisure.  They sleep until they’re hungry and they eat until they’re sleepy and after a few years of this they notice that they don’t feel very well, their pants don’t fit, and they’re on more BP meds now than they were when they were stressed out and working so they decide to get in shape.

My patient Jim followed this path and reached the point where he decided to rededicate himself to his health.  I tell him that’s a great idea.  He says he’s going to buy a bicycle; I tell him that’s a bad idea.  I tell him that bicycles make you healthier but they don’t make you live longer.  I’ve seen horrible accidents over the years.  I mean horrible stuff.  I have four close friends who either died or were crippled by bicycle accidents.  Jim figures that I’m just being a typical overly cautious doctor (which was probably true), and buys a bike.  He rides a lot, starts losing weight, and feels much better.  We even stopped some of his meds.

Then, he wiped out.  He wasn’t going very fast (he says less than 10mph), and he thinks maybe he hit a pine cone or something.  Anyway, he broke his pelvis in two places plus various other bones.  Very serious injuries for a 68-year-old man.  The surgical repair went well, but he developed pneumonia in the hospital.  We treated that, sent him home, and he came back a week later with a blood clot.  The next year was a brutal journey of one setback after another, being transferred from nursing facilities to hospitals to rehab centers and back again, but he eventually overcame everything, and a year later was nearly back to normal, although he had a lot of back pain at that point.  Since his wife now takes a similar view of his bicycle as I do, he’s looking for another way to get back in shape.