Tag: dailyprompt

What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?

None of your business.

I am not fond of tattoos but if I had to have one I would put one saying « Do Not Resuscitate, or just DNR » directly on my sternum.

Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

Dr. Gerald Klatskin, professor of medicine at Yale in the 1970s is my obvious choice. For three years, I was a fellow in his Liver Study Unit. He was a patient teacher, researcher and friend. We fellows learned early on to never go to his office late in the day (his door was always open) to ask a question as we would be there for hours as he expounded on an answer, with both data and anecdotes.

What are your two favorite things to wear?

Summer: Full chest waders and fishing vest.

Winter: Long johns, lined jeans, lined jacket, balaclava and tall hiking boots.

What are your family’s top 3 favorite meals?

I do little of the cooking or baking but my wife makes delicious lentil soup with a variety of other vegetables and some small pieces of beef or chicken added, a great vegetable lasagna, and, believe it or not, great beef tongue with bay leaves and onions. We don’t have deserts,on a daily basis, but I do occasionally bake good Mississippi mud pies and/or sour cream and raisin merengue pies.

What was your favorite subject in school?

Definitely English literature and writing, writing essays, and correcting spelling, mostly under the supervision of my great high school teacher, Don Birtwhistle. Then I failed English 20 in university!

What are you most proud of in your life?

For years, I researched the chronic itch of some common liver diseases and proved that an old drug was an effective treatment.

If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?

We already have a charity established to support Doctors Without Borders, so that is my choice.

List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.

1. Join Doctors Without Borders in some capacity.

2.volunteer in a public library.

3. Coach beginner curlers.

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

My wife does most of the cooking and baking, but once in a while I get the urge to try something from my memories of mother’s great cooking. With my first attempt to make her sour cream raisin pie with meringue topping. I had trouble separating the egg whites and yolks so some yolk get into the whites whipped up to make meringue and I put too much water into the sour cream and raisin mix. The result was a runny mess with a topping that could not be cut without the meringue sticking to the knife and coming right off.

Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.

Satchel Paige of baseball fame for overcoming racial biases and his wonderful sense of humour, and Canadian figure skating champions Tessa Virtue and Scot Moir because they grew up and skated with my children in Ilderton, Ontario

What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

Very little. In our house, TV was the invention of the devil, although in 1960, at age, 15 or so, with attitudes changing I was allowed to walk to our aunt’s home and watch the Ed Sullivan show.

What do you enjoy most about writing?

I enjoy sharing differing perspectives with readers of my books or my blogs of book reviews. Whether it is science, medicine, history, philosophy, religion or documentation of interesting people in the form of biographies or autobiographies, the widely divergent viewpoints can only expand one’s own mind. And if readers disagree with me, that too is helpful in making me think harder.

What is a word you feel that too many people use?

I am very tired of hearing people, in interviews on radio or television, whether the interviewer or the person being interviewed, stalling by using the interjection “you know”. Not just one word, I realize, but very annoying, especially if I don’t know.

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?

If I can provide some readers suggestions about books that they might enjoy and some that are to be avoided even if very popular, my aim in starting the blog will be accomplished.

What are you curious about?

Over many years of my professional life, I studied the interminable whole body itchiness that many patients with certain kinds of liver disease suffer from. Although I made progress in understanding this common and debilitating symptom, and found a partially effective new treatment, the ultimate cause is still a mystery that I am still curious about. As far as I know no one has come up with what evolutionary benefit could be concurred on someone forced to scratch themselves raw, but I suspect it is somehow linked to the disturbed Vitamin D metabolism in liver diseases, allowing more production of it from sunlight in deeper skin layers

If you could bring back one dinosaur, which one would it be?

An avian of some sort, perhaps a passenger pigeon, which is ra dinosaur descendent that relatively recently we made extinct.

If you won two free plane tickets, where would you go?

Somewhere in Australia, the only continent that I haven’t visited

What foods would you like to make?

I struggle with any cooking, but I have made a good imitation of mother’s delicious sour cream raisin pie with meringue topping, and the Mississippi mud pie that she loved when I took her for lunch from the nursing home to the Crossroads restaurant in Elmira.

Which activities make you lose track of time?

Fly fishing in a quiet stream for trout or salmon, with flies that I tied.