Since a bunch of readers have asked, I’ll give a quick update about the fire in Santa Barbara.  I took the photo above when MD and I went out to dinner last night in downtown Santa Barbara.  The top of our car, which is parked next to the restaurant, is in the foreground, providing some perspective.

As it stands now, MD and I are a little ways from the evacuation area, but the margin is getting closer and closer.  Fires move pretty fast when they are driven by winds gusting from 60-70 mph.  I’ve driven around and looked at the fire and placed it on a map and compared it to where we are.  When I do this and think about it, the reasoning, cognitive part of my brain tells me that we are in no danger at this point, but the primitive, reptilian part of my brain screams a different message.

If you click this link you can see a Google map of Santa Barbara that will update every 15 minutes.  You can see the areas that are under voluntary and mandatory evacuations.  And you can see how far this fire has spread in just four days, which is what the primitive part of my brain is focusing on. You’ll have to scroll to the right to see the part of the fire that affects us.  Our house is north of E. Valley Rd and above the Birnam Wood Golf Course.  If you see the edge of this evacuation hit Birnam Wood, you’ll know we’re out of here.

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When I first learned of Twitter, I thought it was the most idiotic thing I had ever heard of.  My thinking was similar to that of the suits in the photo above.  Who gives a flying flip about the fact that I’m at the gas station or grocery store, or, God forbid, that I’m headed to the golf course?

But after reading about it a little more, I realized the potential.  Not for having all my friends know where I am or what I’m doing every second of the day, but for the transmission of information about other things.  I read a lot, and I’m constantly coming across articles of interest.  My first thought is almost always, I should blog about that.  Then I realize that the piece really isn’t worthy of an entire long blog post.

When we first started the website, I figured I could get the info out by putting it in the News Headlines section of the front page, but I soon realized that almost no one was reading the news headlines I put up.  How did I figure this out?  By putting up a news headline about, say, a new study that came out, then having 15 commenters ask me if I had heard of this same new study.

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I have been dilatory in posting over the past few days and embarrassingly dilatory about approving comments.  I’m way, way behind, but I’ll get caught up ultimately.  So, if you have a comment doing time in comment Purgatory, don’t despair.  I will get to it.  Ultimately.

My excuse for not devoting my normal amount of attention to this blog is that I’ve been extremely busy as of late.  MD and I made a quick trip to Seattle to work on our world-changing project, then came back and spent a couple of days at the zoo that is Expo West (more about which momentarily), then the Seattle team came to us and we continued to work.  During all this, MD had a concert in which she had to perform Mozart’s Requiem and Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna (my favorite piece of choral music) along with a couple of lesser pieces.  And tomorrow we drive back to Tahoe.  So, we’ve been busy little beavers and this blog has suffered.

Expo West has got to be the world’s largest natural foods expo.  It takes place every year at about this time in Anaheim.  And every year at about this time we drag ourselves to it.  The photo at the top of this blog represents one tiny little portion of this gathering.  To see how huge it is, take a look at the photo below of the map of the thing.

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Usually there is enough stupidity rearing its ugly head in the medical literature to keep me busy full time trying to deal with it, so I don’t ever run out of stuff to blog on.  The problem seems to be an overabundance of material, not a lack.  It seems that every time I’m getting warmed up to write one of the posts that I’ve been planning on writing, some researcher or drug company comes out with something that demands a post, so I abandon whatever I’m working on to get to the more current issue.  I know all the things I would really like to post on, but I don’t know exactly what you readers would like to read about.

Here’s your chance.

Use the comment section to make suggestions for issues you would like to see covered in blog posts over this next year.  I can’t promise that I can get to all of them or even most of them, but I would be extremely interested in learning what it is you want to see from me.  If you see that someone else has already posted a comment about what you would like to see, go ahead and second it.  The more requests I have for a specific topic, the more likely I’ll be to pursue it.

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