Week 171: Portuguese Medical Journals
Or what wading through all the articles can teach me.
[A shortened one this week, because of what I've been doing, listed here, and because we took Catie to a community theatre production of Kiss Me, Kate this evening. Because it was outdoors, they didn't wrap until 11:15, tying up my writing time.]
Summer has come and I'm now at the point where the garden has been planted and now I'm just watching it grow for a while. I've pre-inherited the space in my mother's raised beds; she is willing to help with it this year, but she wanted me to start taking it over so I can experience all the stress when the deer jump the fence and stomp through the squash looking for tomatoes, or vice versa. Today, the beds are now currently occupied by too many tomato plants and basil interstitials, peppers and green beans. After last year's May rainstorms flooded out my seedlings, I over-produced seedlings for this year, to the point where I've given away 30 or so plants to relatives in the past two weeks. I will have to achieve a balance in future years.
I've also expanded a section of partial sun below the house which includes the previously mentioned asparagus beds. That was just one bed of potatoes last year, and this year it's expanded to onions, garlic, shallots, and a big pit of purple potatoes. We had taken a plastic potato growing sheet and put it in a cylinder, fenced by a selection of steel poles I had in the garage. I set up the patch, drove the poles into the ground, and put the cut potatoes in. I announced its completion to my wife with the text:
Purple
Potato
Pit
Positioned.
Poles
Picked,
Pounded.
Potatoes
Partitioned,
Planted.
She didn't justify that text with a response, which was well within her rights.
I had gotten really committed to this gardening originally to infuriate my cardiologist. Since they can't help but advocate vigorous exercise, because they really don't have any remaining ideas, I use this and receipts of verified step counts to keep them off my back. A full examination of all three garden areas nets me 5,000 steps, and since the tiller's engine was broken all spring, I put in several 15,000 step days getting the patches of dirt up to speed. But we're now at the point of waiting for flowers and fruit, and I'm just hoping for steady rain, so I have something to do in July.
The original plan for this week was to have a practice, but it's difficult to do so when the swirling excitement of Taylor Swift concerts is present. Two of the team had tickets, and so the rest of the team didn't want to disrupt their enjoyment of the weekend. I was skeptical of this reasoning but I was not about to impose because I didn't have anything more than packets to read for practice yet. So hopefully next week, we'll have organized ourselves into a regular summer schedule, and I will have caught up on creating card sets for them.
"Portuguese Medical Journals" was a running gag in the series House that some of House's inspirations came from finding information about odd cases in the oddest of publications, or at least it became a joke on Television Without Pity. As I'm now deep in the season of finding high school graduate college information, I'm also picking up lots of interesting things from around the world that isn't necessarily useful today, but certainly qualifies as neat. I'll wrap up this week with a selection of the more interesting bits:
- Finding out when televised quiz bowl is returning to studios. Fortunately most television programs are making a big deal about when they are returning to a studio. It is a major step bringing programs back into studios, and it's been associated with switching stations (Washington DC's It's Academic) and switching sponsors. (Raleigh Durham's show is now being produced at a campus auditorium.)
- New ways to propagate stories: Would your hometown paper like to know about your college exploits? That was an approach covered by Capital One College Bowl. I am now trying to figure out how best to apply to the ICT.
- Learning about competition in other countries. In the past, I have gotten to follow competitions in the Philippines, Jamaica, and Grenada through local newspaper reports, but I got to follow a report on Reach for the Top in Canada, and how it's being revitalized by a barnstorming set of alumni. I also ended up reading a report of how the Rotary Club of Goa had organized an 81-team tournament, consisting of a written test and the top six playing in person. Chief of the attractions of this to me was discovering that Goa had a Rotary Club. An annual Rotary trivia competition was my first post-college experience as a ringer, after my father’s lawyer got screwed the previous year on a ruling of whether sitzbath was an acceptable answer.
- I also learned that the National Speech and Debate Tournament is advertising itself as the world's largest academic competition. I'm going to have to at least get numbers to compare.
- I had been aware of knowledge bowl competitions within the Lakota nation but I hadn't realized they were doing both a knowledge bowl competition and a separate language bowl competition.
- Schools Challenge is a show in Jamaica, but in Australia it's a track meet.
- While I am reasonably confident in my ability to find all the TV programs which do quiz bowl, I have no such confidence in my ability to find radio competitions. I think the reason for this is that radio stations, especially local radio stations don't really put a great deal of thought into when they create their own news. So while a station may have a local news feed, and while they may have a place on their site for the tournament that airs on their station, the two processes often aren't connected, and you don't often see them rebroadcasting episodes on their site, or making note of results in their newsfeed. Sometimes the only reason I find out about a station is because they started their season and put out a note on their news feed, or in the case of WSJM in St. Joseph, Michigan, I only find out about their program because they marked their 60th anniversary last year. Only an anniversary ending in zero was something they deemed remarkable enough to note.
- The one thing which has been uncomfortable has been finding all the obituaries which now have added space for people's high school activities. I should temper that discomfort by realizing that that is a function of greater engagement generally in quiz bowl, and so it's natural to see more people passing away with quiz bowl in their history as a positive experience. But that still doesn't make it comfortable.
- The circuit, and I include myself in this, does a pretty miserable of advertising our vast repository of solved problems. Frequently during this survey I see issues that would never have been a problem if the people who faced the problem had known of the existence of all of the circuit's missteps and corrections.