Yesterday I gave the eulogy for my father. It was a very hard thing to do, but I am proud of the writing. I share it below: Continue reading
A eulogy for my father
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Read-a-long post 4
Part Two – Hokhmah
Chapter Five – “And begin by combining this name”
Now we know who Abraham Abulafia is, and have the old practice of letter combinations updated with a snippet of code.
Words/terms looked up:
Ennoia – Greek Σοφíα, meaning “wisdom” – okay, so that explains Sophia, but not who Lorenza Pellegrini is. (First mentioned in Chapter 3.)
Chapter Six – “Judá León se dio a permutaciones”
Judá León se dio a permutaciones
Juda León worked out (various) permutations
De letras y a complejas variaciones
of letters and complex variations
Y al fin pronunció el Nombre que es la Clave,
And finally pronounced the Name which is the Key,
La Puerta, el Eco, el Huésped y el Palacio…
The Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace…
http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/jorge-luis-borges-el-golem.htm
message 14: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1567087-discussion-thread-1-foucault-s-pendulum-chapters-1-to-end-of-chapter
This chapter begins with a portion of a poem by Borges!
No? No is the password? That is the stupidest thing I’ve read so far in this book. Now, maybe if No released a sanitized partition that was opened… but could a word processor from that era do that?
Found in the brain of Abulafia is file of 120 quotations. This book has 120 chapters, each starting with a quotation. Nice symmetry.
Words/terms looked up:
Macumba – religion is practiced by a large number of Brazilians, and involves the apparent possession of worshippers by their gods
atabaque – a tall, wooden, Afro-Brazilian hand drum, used in capoeria
Part Three – Binah
Chapter Seven – “Do not expect too much of the end of the world.”
Binah meaning understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binah_(Kabbalah)
Lia? of Chapter 3’s “Lia and the baby”?
The demonstrations and revolution Casaubon reports strikes a strange chord, with anti-Trump demonstrations happening weekly in today’s America.
So here we discover the beginning of the Templar obsession, and a marker of 1972.
Chapter Eight – “Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.”
Location: Pilade’s bar. I got the reference to Rick’s Cafe from Casablanca. Small victories, and another mention of Lorenza, a pinball wizard?
I think I don’t like Belbo.
Chapter Nine – “In his right hand he held a golden trumpet.”
Yep, definitely don’t like Belbo.
Chapter Ten – “And finally, nothing is cabalistically inferred from vinum”
Hah. I got the Zhivago joke!
Four kinds of people in the world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. I can believe this world view.
Chapter Eleven – “His sterility”
Belbo’s imagination at taking on W. Shakespeare’s work as an editor was a nice bit.
I don’t catch the God incognito novel reference. Google lists one published in 1974, possibly the one Eco could have read before publishing Foucault’s Pendulum in 1988.
Also don’t catch the Seven Seas Jim reference. Possibly this: https://books.google.com/books?id=v1EHAQAAIAAJ&q=Jim+of+the+seven+seas&dq=Jim+of+the+seven+seas&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiSroLNgq3SAhUJzoMKHeQ0CwkQ6AEIHDAA? At least it was entertaining to read.
Chapter Twelve – “Sub umbra alarum tuarum, Jehova” Under the shadow of thy Lord.
Cas enters Garamond Press. Immediately we meet a woman who was named by the men in the office, but not with her real name. Jerks.
I do like the School of Comparative Irrelevance and their impossible courses.
Interesting that the Marquis de Carabas in this chapter references the Puss in Boots origin, I must have known this reference first, but to me the Marquis de Carabas will evoke Gaiman’s Neverwhere instead.
Read-a-long post 3
Part Two – Hokhmah
Chapter Three – “In hanc utilitatem clementes angeli”
The intro to this chapter has been translated in Google Groups & recorded in Goodreads as
To this advantage, clement messengers have discovered designs,
symbols, shapes and spells, and have set before us mortals tokens
both obscure and enormous, in no manner near to the accustomed usage
of speech; but through the highest wonder of our reason, we have
been led over into an earnest examination of intelligible things,
and thereupon to their very reverence and love.
We have a name! The narrator is named Casaubon.
So the main characters we have so far:
- Abulafia – a wordprocesser
- Belbo, Jacopo – Missing. Owner of Abulafia.
- Casaubon – Narrator
- Diotallevi – explainer of the first Sefirah (p. 16), in the hospital (p.19)
- Gudrun – Accompanied Diotallevi to the hospital, female, responsible for keeping “the business going.”
It was so funny to see the first improvisations on a word processor. This technology revolutionized the concept of authorship, just like Gutenberg’s movable type press.
Chapter Four – “He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden”
I’m on a roll!
My guess on the password? Whiskey.
What a strange engraving.
Words/terms looked up:
notarikon, gematria, temurah – three ancient methods used by Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible, in the belief that by this method they can derive the esoteric substratum and deeper spiritual meaning of the words.
oriens – The East (Latin)
Read-a-long post 2
Part One – Keter
Chapter Two – “Wee haue divers curious Clocks”
Otherwise known as Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, oh my!
So many brand and trademark names.None meant any to me, nor did they bring up any images in my head. Except for the bicycles (velocipedes) that were described as having “huge art-nouveau wheels.” Those brought the familiar pennyfarthing to mind.
So I quickly whipped up a slideshow of 7 slides that illustrate the six cars mentioned in our protagonist’s search for a hiding place. (Does he have a name yet? I don’t think we know it yet.)
Words/terms looked up:
- Gramme – not 100% positive, but I believe this passage, “your back protected by a great stone statue of Gramme,” refers to Zénobe Gramme, electrical engineer.
- Madurodam – I picked up from context that this was an amusement park, but looking this up was fun: https://www.madurodam.nl/en/ Anyone want to go to the Netherlands?
- Empedocles – (“A vulcanologist does not burn like Empedocles.”) Wikipedia tells me that Diogenes Laërtius records the legend that Empedocles died by throwing himself into Mount Etna in Sicily
- “Frazer did not flee, hounded, into the wood of Nemi.” – Refers to James George Frazer and his study of ancient myths, especially the legend of the rex Nemorensis – recorded in The Golden Bough.
- Lavoisier’s mirrors – Antoine Lavoisier was an interesting guy to read about. His work with the Law of Mass Conservation was so poetic: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”
- catoptric – of or relating to a mirror, a reflector, or reflection.
- alembic – an alchemical still consisting of two vessels connected by a tube, used for distilling chemicals.
- eolopile – A device containing a usually spherical chamber or container, in which steam is heated and ejected through one or more narrow tubes to create propulsion or torque.
- demiurge – an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe.
- balneum mariae – also known as a bain-marie, or double boiler (like how we melt chocolate!) http://www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com/b/balneum-mariae/ records the alchemic link
- acajou – mahogany
Read-a-long post 1
A group of friends and I have decided to tackle Foucault’s Pendulum together. We have a target of reading the first 100 pages (roughly the first sixteen chapters) before meeting to talk about it over a couple bottles of wine.
This is where I will keep my notes, so I can come back to them when I inevitably forget everything clever or meaningful when I’m on the spot.
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco is one of those books that I’ve tried to read many times. I feel good that this time, with friends beside me, I will actually get it done.
Part One – Keter
Chapter One – “When the light of the infinite”
First mystery: What was the Hebrew passage at the opening of the chapter?
A google image search suggests it is a passage of the Zohar,
a group of books including commentary on the mystical aspects of the Torah … scriptural interpretations as well as material on mysticism, mythical cosmogony, and mystical psychology. The Zohar contains discussions of the nature of God, the origin and structure of the universe, the nature of souls, redemption, the relationship of Ego to Darkness and “true self” to “The Light of God”, and the relationship between the “universal energy” and man.
Were these words from chapter 1, “Tune had begun. Its great pendulum, whose beats are the ages, commenced to vibrate. The era of creation or manifestation had at last arrived.”
Seems reasonable to guess yes, since the entire first chapter seemed to be a meditation on the pendulum hanging in a museum.
Words/terms looked up:
- panta rei – “Everything flows” from the philosophy of Heraclitius. Rhei is Greek for stream, which makes me associate this now with Netflix.
- astigmatic circumference – distorted, misshapen, not round
- Jacopo Belbo – not a historical figure, simply a character in this book
- choir, nave, priory – all church related vocabulary. Architectural terms, or in the case of a priory, an entire structure.
Holiday Movie Fun
Happy holidays!
For our institution’s holiday luncheon, I put together a Movie Quote activity. I tried to pick lines from a variety of films, from a variety of years. Some are well known, some less known. Some were easy, a few were challenging.
I’m sharing it with you, dear reader, and hope you enjoy it!
There are 21 lines – I suppose removing one would make the formatting on the 2nd page better, especially seeing as there were two lines from “A Christmas Carol” – but that can be done at your discretion.
Legal Bullies and a Poster Layout
Once upon a time, our institution’s poster sized printer was housed in our building. This fact made it necessary for me to learn graphic design of scientific (and not so scientific) posters in order to help our students and faculty. One resource I found and have visited time and again is the site created by Colin Purrington. He has written a very helpful guide on how to design conference posters that will be eye-catching, not eye-bleeding. It is helpful and humorous at the same time. Imagine my sadness to find out that his content has been stolen, distributed, and then when he had the temerity to complain – he was notified that the company that did the copy-theft was going to sue him.
I hope that this will settle out in Mr. Purrington’s favor. In honor of his work in making the world a better place for conference attendees, I am sharing a poster template that I created for one of my nursing faculty. It is a bit flashier than a scientific conference poster. There is no space devoted to literature cited or specific methods or discussion sections. I made it for a horizontal 24” x 36” poster, but you can go into page setup and change that if you’d like. Change whatever you’d like. Definitely plan on changing the clip art to something copyright free and appropriate to your topic. Enjoy and have a good conference!
Graphic Novel talk – Spring 2013
One of my favorite things to do is to read graphic novels. Sometimes I talk about them in front of classes. Once I even submitted my slideshow to a journal. (If you want, you can see it here.)
This semester, I had a brilliant idea and designed a handout that could be folded into a quick comic book of sorts.
First, print out the file attached to this post with a two sided print setting, then fold it in half with the Vocabulary page turned to the back. This gives you an entirely blank Title Page, a single panel Splash Page, and a third page with a variety of panels. Pages 4 and 5 are left deliberately blank, so you have the option of a two page spread, or you can also use the panels from the reverse side which can be seen when printing on standard office weight paper. Pages 6 and 7 have different panel layouts, and page 8 is a vocabulary list I used in introducing concepts to the class.
It was a course called "Writing and Memoirs" so I pulled a number of different graphic novels from our collection that were examples of a memoir in an illustrated format. Want a list?
- American Born Chinese
- Cancer Vixen
- Maus
- Mom’s Cancer
- Persepolis
- Paul Goes Fishing
- Special Exits
- The Burma Chronicles
- To Dance
After my introduction and show and tell, I paired off the students and had them work together to illustrate a paragraph of text. When I was planning this activity, I was going to have them use a nursery rhyme (I was using the brilliant Nursery Rhyme Comics to showcase many different art and narrative styles. This also explains why the panel layouts have a title panel in the top tier.) but that morning Neil Gaiman released the text of his Calendar of Tales, and I decided the May Tale was evocative and mysterious, and more likely to be better received by the students.
It was a very satisfying class visit. I talked for about half an hour, let them work together for about twenty minutes, then spent the last ten sharing the students’ work via the document camera.
I think next time I’ll aim for more discussion, instead of just show & tell for the first half. The active learning component went very well, and I’ll probably do that again, perhaps with more explanation that they are working in pairs because although graphic novels can be the effort of a single person, it is more likely that each one is a result of a massive group effort.
Nursing in Film
I’m the subject librarian for our Nursing department, as well as being the audio visual librarian here. Last year these two roles converged when I was asked to suggest films that portrayed nurses. This year, a very similar request came across the videolib listserv. Since I had something to share there, I thought I should share my list here as well.
I’ve taken my list, added the other list members’ contributions, and have done my best to give citation information as far as Studio or Distributor is concerned.
There are thousands of films that include a nurse, or the portrayal of a nurse. If you want to search for some yourself, you may want to start with the Internet Movie Database.
http://www.imdb.com/keyword/nurse/
http://www.imdb.com/keyword/nursing/
| Title | Place: Studio or Distributor | Date | Type |
| Angels in America | New York, NY: HBO Video | 2004 | Feature Film |
| Awakenings | Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video | 1997 | Feature Film |
| Catch Me If You Can | Universal City, CA: DreamWorks Home Entertainment | 2003 | Feature Film |
| The Curious Case of Benjamin Button | Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment | 2009 | Feature Film |
| A Farewell to Arms (Videocassette release of the 1932 motion picture) | Springfield, NJ: Madacy Entertainment Group | 1932/1996 | Feature Film |
| Girl, Interrupted | Culver City, CA: Columbia Tristar Home Video | 1999 | Feature Film |
| John Q | [Los Angeles, CA]: New Line Home Entertainment | 2002 | Feature Film |
| Juno | Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment | 2008 | Feature Film |
| Meet the Parents | Universal City, CA: Universal | 2001 | Feature Film |
| Million Dollar Baby | Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video | 2005 | Feature Film |
| Nurse Betty | [Hollywood], CA: USA Home Entertainment | 2000 | Feature Film |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video | 1997 | Feature Film |
| Terminator 2 Judgment Day | Santa Monica, CA: Artisan Home Entertainment | 2003 | Feature Film |
| Wit | New York, NY: HBO Home Video | 2001 | Feature Film |
| A Calling to Care | Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources | 2001 | Documentary |
| All My Babies: A Midwife’s Own Story (DVD release of the 1952 film) | Chatsworth, CA : Image Entertainment | 1952/2007 | Documentary |
| The Doctor | Burbank, CA: Touchstone Home Video | 1991 | Feature Film |
| Night Nurse (Videocassette release of the 1931 motion picture) | Culver City, CA: MGM/UA Home Video | 1931/1991 | Feature Film |
| World According to Garp (Videocassette release of the 1982 motion picture) | Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video | 1982/1998 | Feature Film |
| Bringing Out the Dead | Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment | 1999 | Feature Film |
| Pregnancy Pact | United States: Lifetime | 2010 | TV Movie |
| China Beach | United States: Warner Brothers Television | 1988-1991 | Television series |
| ER | Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video | 1994-2009 | Television series |
| Scrubs | Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment | 2001-2010 | Television series |
| Mercy | Universal City, CA: Universal Studios | 2009-2010 | Television series |
| HawthoRNe | Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment | 2009-2011 | Television series |
| Nurse Jackie | Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Home Entertainment | 2009- | Television series |
| Young Doctors | United States: United Artists | 1961 | Feature Film |
| The English Patient | Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment | 1996 | Feature Film |
| M.A.S.H. | Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment | 1972 | Feature Film |
| M.A.S.H. | Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment | 1972-1983 | Television series |
| Good Night, Nurse (In Arbuckle & Keaton Vol. 2) | New York, NY: Kino International | 1918/2001 | Short |
| High Anxiety | Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment | 1977 | Feature Film |
| The White Angel (Videocassette release of the 1936 motion picture) | Baker City, OR : Nostalgia Family Video | 1936 | Feature Film |
| Misery | Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment | 1990 | Feature Film |
| Carry On, Nurse (DVD release of 1959 film) | Troy, MI. : Anchor Bay Entertainment [distributor] | 1959/2002 | Feature Film |
| The Young Nurses (In The Nurses Collection, a DVD release of Roger Corman’s films) |
Los Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory LLC | 1973/2012 | Feature Film |
| Candy Stripe Nurses (In The Nurses Collection, a DVD release of Roger Corman’s films) |
Los Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory LLC | 1974/2012 | Feature Film |
| Night Call Nurses (In The Nurses Collection, a DVD release of Roger Corman’s films) |
Los Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory LLC | 1972/2012 | Feature Film |
| Private Duty Nurses (In The Nurses Collection, a DVD release of Roger Corman’s films) |
Los Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory LLC | 1971/2012 | Feature Film |
| Hellcats of the Navy (DVD release of a 1957 motion picture) | Burbank, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video | 1957/2003 | Feature Film |
| Sister Kenny (Videocassette release of the 1946 motion picture) | [S.l.]: Turner Home Entertainment | 1946/1990 | Feature Film |
| The Tall Guy (DVD release of the 1989 motion picture) | Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment | 1989/2002 | Feature Film |
| Kill Bill, Vol. 1 | Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment | 2003 | Feature Film |
| Yes, Nurse! No, Nurse! (Ja zuster, nee zuster) | Paris : BQHL productions | 2002 | Feature Film |
NursinginFilm.xlsx
When is a space not a space?
When it’s simply a character brought in from a webpage.
A department requested that I take the Teams they had created in our LMS and put them into an Outlook Contact list. The LMS had no export feature for lists of teams, but there was a page that lined a nice chunk of data up so nicely – Name, Login, Team Membership. So I grabbed these three columns and went to work in Excel.
The Name column was easily split using Text to Columns into LastName and FirstName columns. I created a column containing the domain for our institution, and then attempted to =CONCATENATE the login column with the domain column. This should have created a beautiful column with the student’s e-mail addresses. Instead, there was a space between the username and the @. So I tried using the TRIM function. No good. I tried a Find and Replace with a space in the Find field and nothing in the Replace field. Failed again. What finally worked was to copy the faux space from the login column and to paste that into the Find field, leaving nothing in the Replace field. Success! (And now, I found a website describing this exact problem & a solution to it. http://www.theexceladdict.com/_t/ebk56mft.htm After I’ve fought out my own solution. Of course.)
I’ve finished off the request with several New Contact Groups in Outlook, where I’ve imported these .csv files and mapped the columns to custom fields in Outlook. So now the department can e-mail their students using whatever account they want.
There. I’ve learned something new & shared it. I don’t know anyone else who does, but I enjoy my Excel wrangling. It gives me a lot of satisfaction in puzzling out how to make the program do what I want.
Something to Share 