Rational Arguments

I was born and raised on the East Coast.  I went to college on the East Coast, and then medical school on the East Coast.  Then, my wife (then fiance) and I picked up and moved all the way out to the West Coast for 5 years.  It wasn’t until 2003 that I spent any real time in the Midwest.

It wasn’t until 2003 that I ever went to a state fair.

For people who don’t live in places like this, there is simply no way to explain the Indiana State Fair.  There is a whole thing with animals and showing them.  I don’t understand any of it.  Truly, I can’t tell the difference between the pig that wins first place and the one who goes home empty handed.  There are rides, but I don’t trust any of them.  There are shows, but I don’t really care for anyone performing there.  So why do we go?

The food.  It’s completely insane.

You can turn on Top Chef or any show on the Food Network and hear about chefs on the “cutting edge”.  They may be deconstructing old favorites, or using molecular gastronomy, or fusing two cuisines.  They have NOTHING on the artists at the state fair.

State fair food people do things that no one in the real world would dare.  They push the limits, to the point that I no longer know where this will end.

I warn you.  The rest of this post is not for the faint of heart.

My wife grew up in Milwaukee.  She will occasionally talk of food that she loved at their state fair when she was a child.  Because of this, we always manage to nab one of these (her favorites):

That is a chocolate cream puff. We once got one that I swear weighed 6 pounds.  My crack team of eaters – 5 of us – put this down in less than a minute.  We’re veterans of the state fair.  Cream puffs are for, well, cream puffs.  This is a warm up.

After all that sweet, you gotta have some salty.  Luckily, this was right across the way:

Get this.  The geniuses at the state fair have invented this gizmo where they can take a whole spud, and just by spinning it, they can turn it into one long mobius-strip of potato.  Then they drop it in a deep fat fryer until it’s absolutely deadly. It’s like a potato chip, only not as good for you.  They serve it with a cheese-like sauce and all the ketchup you can carry.  It’s too big for the plate.  This might have taken us 2 minutes to polish off.

Just so you know, I took a Pepcid before we left.

Some of you are thinking I’ve overplayed my hand right now.  After all, these aren’t really that bad.  Sure, they’re unhealthy, but not really interesting.  I laugh at your naivete.  Because here is where the fun begins.  Here is where the Indiana State Fair blows your mind.

Back in 2003, before I left for the fair, everyone would ask one question.  Are you going to eat this:

Of course I was.  Back in ’03, the cutting edge of state fair food was the deep-fried Twinkie.  Why, you ask?  Because a regular Twinkie is for health nuts.  They take a Twinkie, dip it in batter, and then drop it in the deep fryer.  When you eat it, it’s like a funnel cake wrapped around regular cake wrapped around sugar.  See the sign above “Bread Man”?  That sign is letting you know that you can take home a bag.

Although my oldest son and I tried this back at that first fair, we passed on it in subsequent years.  Not because it was terrible, although it sorta was, but because every year for the next 5 years, they found something else to deep fry:

Behold the wonder of the deep fried candy station.  This beauty appeared at the second state fair I attended in 2004.  That year, I partook of a deep fried Oreo.  Sure, Oreos are good and all.  But…  it’s deep fried!  Dipped in batter, dropped in the fryer, and then covered in powdered sugar.  Much better than the Twinkie.  But they weren’t done there.  In 2005, they added the deep fried Snickers.  Push a stick into the Snickers, drench it in batter, fry it, and powder it with sugar.  The master stroke of this one is that the Snickers melts inside the batter, so when you bite it, you get to scald your mouth with molten Snickers. Mmmmmmmm.

Over the next few years, they added deep fried Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, deep fried cookie dough, deep fried Milky Ways, and deep fried Pepsi.  From what I hear, they inject some dough with Pepsi and give it the usual routine.

If you look at the yellow sign, they have the “Special Candy Combo”.  That’s what true gourmets like us get.  One deep fried Snickers, one deep fried Reeses, and two deep fried Oreos.  We take this basket of goodness behind the cart, outside the Cattle barn, and (ignoring the manure smell) my children gather around like baby birds awaiting a worm.  After sampling each of these, my wife and I lower the sticks in each of the treats into our childrens’ mouths so they can take a bite.  We go around in circles until the “food” is all gone.  I have no fear of spreading germs.  No germs could live on this stuff.

We satisfied ourselves on deep fried candy and such until 2009.  But the state fair people were obviously anything but satisfied.  In 2009, they rolled out this baby:

That’s not a Photoshopped fake.  It’s chocolate covered bacon.  My wife, who is usually a sport, tapped out here.  Not my kids, though.  Nothing could stop them.  We stepped up and placed an order.  When the chef collected our bacon from the vat of chocolate, she asked if we wanted powdered sugar on it.  I was temporarily frozen.  After all, I had no idea how true connoisseurs ate their “Pigs in the Mud”.  We opted for the sugar.

The bacon was soggy.  It was disappointing.  Not terrible tasting, but better in concept than in execution.

That brings us to 2010.  A few weeks ago, the whispering began.  How could they top chocolate covered bacon?  I read a few posts from people attending other state fairs which confirmed for me that Indiana was ahead of its time.  Our maestros could not let us down.  They would have to once again prove their mettle.

And, boy, did they:

The “Doughnut Burger”.  Words failed me.  What insane mastermind looked at a burger and thought, “You know what this is missing? Glazed Krispy Kremes.”  And that’s what they did.  You may not be able to see it, but you can get your doughnut burger with cheese and/or bacon.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a close-up:

Where do I start?  The doughnuts are on the grill.  They take one of the grilled doughnuts, and put a burger right on top of it.  Everyone seemed to be adding cheese and bacon.  And then they top it off with another doughnut.  It’s like someone thought the Double Down was too healthy.

I’m a pretty adventurous eater.  If I’m in a restaurant, and there’s something funky or odd on the menu, I will order it.  But this…  this was too much.  I couldn’t do it.  Even my kids didn’t fight my decision.

You would be shocked how many of these I saw sold, though.

Where will it end?  I am almost afraid for 2011.  At some point, they will go too far.  I fear that Hoosiers won’t be able to turn back before it’s too late.  Partly, that’s because right next to the doughnut burgers, they were selling this:

Deep.  Fried.  Butter.  Did you hear me?  Deep fried butter!!!  I couldn’t even look.

Isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse?

I was going to take the weekend off, but this had to go up.  NSFW.  Go iPhone!

Happy Fourth, everyone!

The language in this is extremely NSFW.  You’ve been warned.

That said, watching it had me in stitches.  And I say that knowing I clicked the mouse every five minutes all day on June 15th so I could be one of the first to get an iPhone 4.  It worked.  I got mine a day before the official release date.  And I don’t regret it one bit.

(h/t Goldblog)

I started this blog towards the end of last summer, mostly as a place to talk about health care reform.  I found that I was answering the same questions over and over again, and – tired of continually hearing “where would I go to read more on that?” – I decided to put most of my answers in writing.  At least then I could tell people the answer was on my blog.

Although health care reform is far from over as a policy issue, it seems that it is no longer consuming everyone’s lives as it was a few short months ago.  As people’s interest in hearng about the ins and outs of research and policy as it pertains to health care systems wanes, I’ve found myself with less and less to write.

It’s not that I don’t feel like I have anything to say.  It’s that I started this journey by focusing on health care reform because I felt like I had some credibility on the issue.  I have opinions on lots of topics, of course, but at least in that domain I thought I had earned a place in the discussion.  Maybe that’s why I haven’t been posting as much in the last few weeks.

The last week changed that, however, because of two posts.  First, there was my post on vaccines and autism.  It amazes me how much that topic can set people off.  To some, it’s like questioning religion.  I am simply astounded at how many of the emails I received were from people who admitted up front that they knew vaccines caused autism by faith and faith alone.  It’s no longer a matter of science.  The second was my post on my troubles with my prescription and my insurance company.  I didn’t receive any email, but I was surprised (and a little touched) by the people who retweeted it and commented on it in their own blogs.

I sometimes wonder, as I’m sure every blogger does, if what I’m writing makes any difference.  I wonder if anyone reads it.  I see the big league blogs, many of which I list on the right side of the page, and wonder if mine might ever have even a fraction of the impact I’m sure theirs do.  This week has given me renewed hope, mostly because of a string of strange links and common threads.  It’s made me think that the blogging world may be smaller than I assumed.

It started with an email I received from a friend of mine.  I know David (and his wife) back from my days in Seattle.  At the time he was a newspaper reporter and an author.  I still remember reading a draft of his book while I was on call as a resident, where I somehow managed to think I was qualified to make notes and comments on it.  Anyway, David saw my blog post on vaccines and autism and send me a link to this comic on the Andrew Wakefield situation.  You should go check it out, as it shows the situation to be even worse than I made it out to be.  I love getting emails like that because (1) they expand on what I was trying to say and (2) show me people I respect are reading what I write.

But the week got better, when I read Austin Frakt posting about my rant against my insurance company.  I admire Austin’s blog immensely, and have linked to it many times (as have many of the big blogs).  Just a few minutes later, I read a post by David (again) on his own blog, where it turns out one of his emails was excerpted on The Daily Dish.  Turns out it’s his favorite, blog, too.  I was even more surprised to read David’s full email, where it turns out he mentions me, in part because of some of my posts about Megan McArdle’s writings.  Not long after, I was reading The Daily Dish myself, and saw David quoted directly, with attribution this time, on an entirely different subject, as he talked about his guidelines for journalists.

It’s a big week for him, I imagine.  He deserves it.  You should read his blog.

It feels like a big week for me, too.

I’ve written any number of scientific papers.  I’ve written months of blog entries.  I’ve even written a book.  And yet I still have trouble thinking of myself as a writer.  Maybe it’s because English was my least favorite subject in school.  Maybe it’s because I feel like writing is a skill I have forced myself to learn with repetition and not something I’ve been formally trained to do, or a gift, or something that comes easy to me.  Or maybe it’s because I admire some writers so much I just can’t lump myself in with them.  But, as my agent once shouted at me in surprise when I said I said something along these lines, I am a “real” writer.  So maybe I should feel free to write about more than merely health care policy.

I think I just might.

While being a pediatrician can give you a lot of training in how to care for children, you’d be surprised at how much it doesn’t prepare you for being a parent.  I spent the first few months of my oldest’s life using my time in clinic to pepper my co-worker (a real doctor) with questions about what to do with a baby.  And even that was easy, compared to what was to come.

At some point, and it’s hard specifically to say when, your toddlers become actual people.  They start revealing knowledge you know didn’t come from you.  They start talking to their friends about things you don’t understand.  And they start asking real questions.

When they were very little, I decided – for better or worse – to answer their questions honestly, no matter how hard they were.  So far I’ve been doing a pretty decent job.  My wife gives me strange looks when I’m going on about how refraction of light makes the sky blue.  But I feel a particular sense of pride when my kids debate the ability of water to remain suspended in the air to create clouds.

My oldest loves to quiz me about the past.  My youngest loves to ask me questions about my day.  But it’s my middle child who asks the stumpers.

He wants to know about death.  He wants to know about God.  He wants to know why people look different.  Why bad things happen.  Why people act the way they do.

I like to think I’m answering those questions well.  I like to think I’m doing right by him.  Most of the time, I think I am.  But I recognize that harder questions are coming.

I saw this video over at The Daily Dish.

StoryCorps, “an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives,” makes its first animation:

Joshua Littman, a 12-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, interviews his mother, Sarah. Joshua’s unique questions and Sarah’s loving, unguarded answers reveal a beautiful relationship that reminds us of the best—and the most challenging—parts of being a parent.

I am simply in awe of this mother.  Her ability to answer very difficult questions with complete candor, and the obviously strong relationship that allows her to do so, is inspiring.

It makes me want to be a better parent.

UPDATE:  Seems many of you liked this as much as I did.  Here’s a link to Sarah Littman’s blog post about it.

For those of you who don’t follow my twitter feed, getting back from Vancouver yesterday continued my long feud with the airline industry.  Please, someone, tell me how twice, not once, we arrived at airports and no gate was ready for us.  Did no one call ahead?  Did they not expect us?  Really?

After getting back home late last night, I had to get up at 6 AM this morning to give a talk on the ACA.  Since I was on PST still, that felt like 3 AM.

Needless to say, I spent the day a bit grumpy.  But then I saw this:

My love for this video is intensified because I have this and this and this and this and this in my office.  No joke.  It’s quite a show in my office.  And my wife doesn’t want them at home.

(h/t Sullivan)

I don’t know if it’s the fact that it involves science, alcohol, or Tesla (or all three), but I just love this:

Here’s a break from health care reform.

Besides health policy and health services research, I also have an interest in medical myths (see the book down there on the right of this page).  CNN Headline News does a series called “Beyond the Surface” and they taped Rachel and I for a number of pieces on medical myths.  Here’s the latest one:

One of the things that has made this year so amazing was the publication of a book I co-authored (it’s down there on the right side of this blog).  By all rights it’s been a success.  It’s on it’s third printing, it’s being republished in a ridiculous number of countries and languages, and it’s offered us some amazing opportunities in terms of media and publicity.

That said, even a successful book doesn’t sell that many copies.  It doesn’t make you a ton of money, and it doesn’t make you famous.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to say, “No, Oprah hasn’t called yet.”

On Wednesday, Rachel and I trekked all the way over to Bloomington to do a book signing.  We’ve had a number of really good ones.  But this time, not one person showed up.  We signed no books.  Zero.  A few people picked a copy up – right in front of us – and then put it back down and scurried away.  It doesn’t matter how much you’ve succeeded; that hurts.

Which is why this piece by Robert Draper made me so happy:

the author shows up at the bookstore just before seven in the evening. He is a lanky young fellow, with shirtsleeves rolled up and no tie. The store’s two owners greet him with the usual congratulations. One of them has in fact read the book all the way through. The other has not: He found it too long, especially all that stuff about the author’s time as a community organizer in Chicago.

Their store, Eso Won Books, is the leading African-American book vendor in Los Angeles. The owners serve wine and cheese when famous writers such as Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley come by to read. Tonight they hand Barack Obama a glass of water and bring him to the back of the bookstore, where his audience awaits him. All nine of them. None of his former classmates from Occidental College have shown up. He is getting used to this. The reading at his neighborhood bookstore in Chicago—57th Street Books, a Hyde Park co-operative of which he was a member—drew at most thirty, including only one colleague from the University of Chicago, where he teaches constitutional law. The tiny gathering at his book-signing party in Chicago consisted largely of folks whom the hostess, Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s friend and one of the Chicago mayor’s top advisers, had personally begged to drop by.

I feel your pain, President Obama.  I really do.

Bonus: This guy has obviously written a book.

Because it can’t all be about health care reform…

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

(h/t The Daily Dish)