this week i

met howard and teresa in manhattan.  we shared umbrellas with rupak after his lecture, inquired about restaurant wait times, two and a half hours.  bistro seated us immediately, we sampled snail, then starcraft till three.  eight hours sleep, skydiving home movie, beer on ferry, two and a half smorgasburg cuban sandwiches, two arnold palmers in compostable cups.  we walked to transmitter park, then queens no backtracking.  spring and summer wrestled for the day.  overfull with hell's kitchen brussel sprouts and pizza with the perfect char, we found our seats.  all-american prophet, spooky mormon hell dream my favorites, this is american culture concentrate.  hello!  bumper sticker from bus home: do you follow jesus this close

read two hundred years of surgery by atul gawande.

"this yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow," liston exclaimed.

it would take a little while for surgeons to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous. despite the advantages of anesthesia, liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. the butler's operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure. (liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to hollingham. the patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)

4/18