Van Gross of Monte Cristo: Essays, Commentary, Poetry, the Taboo 1997–2004 “The Early Years”

By Kenneth Bruce Van Gross MD

1997 to 2004 encompassed a very turbulent period for the United States and the world more generally. From the Clinton scandals, the lead up to the Millennium, the Great Loose Chad Presidential Election of 2000 to the planet riveting events of September 2001, there is plenty to pontificate about....and Van Gross, MD certainly does that. But he'll get personal, satirical, educational and wax poetic too. As the U.S. entered overseas wars in the early 2000's, its role in the Mid-East, its incipient reformulation of race relations and increasing attention paid to the Americas, only climate change and/or Al Gore would seem to be in the way of planetary chaos. Acknowledging a supporting cast of celebrities from politicians such as Bush and Fidel to performing artists that include Pete Rose and Mother Theresa, Van Gross, MD propels forward from the spectacular insights of Oliver Sacks. This neurologist/commentator wows in the brain/mind/body arenas as well. Short essays and poems pack this volume and even take us back in history to how we got there. Lock in your W's everyone. It's the Van Gross, MD "Who, What and Where Game" and as Sly Stone reminded us way back when "Everybody is a star."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669801740

Kenneth Bruce Van Gross MD

Preceding deplorables such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and wallflowers such as Donald J. Trump, Kenneth Bruce Van Gross, MD jumped off an earth seeking asteroid and became one of the early founders of "fake news" which was originally called “satire” back in the early Aughts but was adopted if not stolen by evil doers to spread political propaganda. Van Gross, MD is a writer and neurologist who has been awarded Diplomate status by both the American Board of Internal Medicine and by the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry (N). He has lectured extensively on The Aging Brain/Aging Mind and presented original thoughts and poetry on that subject. He has delivered commencement addresses at medical college graduations and dissected the brain, body, and behavior in addition to the great speeches of Kennedy and Lincoln as a University Adjunct Professor in Neuropsychiatry, Medicine, Public Speaking and Communications. Beyond his knowledge in medicine, speech/language and the neurosciences, Van Gross, MD, has developed a unique career as a commentator, poet, and multi-dimensional writer. Having been published in peer reviewed medical journals, popular university newspapers and in the general press, he has revealed diverse literary talents. These include the ability, rare among individuals who have entered medicine, to spell the word “cat” and appropriately place it in a sentence. In addition, his stinging wit and unrestrained consciousness pervade much of his poetry and prose on subjects from Politics, World Events and American Cultural Wars to how the brain works in the cranial vaults of zealots, pundits and those who are addicted to reruns of “Get Smart” (“Chief? Max”). Finally, he has violated boundaries with riotous neurosociological and neurophilosophical commentary (including voice impersonations) through the audiotapes That Neuro Guy, Mind Ramblings of Van Gross and published works on the Primal Neuroanthropology of Sports. He has appeared on musical, cultural and educational programs carried by WRCU-FM in Hamilton, NY and by WGBB-AM on Long Island. He has also been featured in The Love Jones Revived Show in Miami as a Spoken Word Artist during which he has presented his Neurofusion Poetry including “MedRap”, “Black White Race, Sex and Sports” and “USA-World Poetry Slam”. While wasting away in Miami, the Caribbean and now Philadelphia compiling a treasury of illegible essays and poems to form works such as Van Gross of Monte Cristo, The Five Books and scrawling the nearly incoherent but Writer’s Digest award winning fictionalized medical adventure, i.e., the play, Movement Disorder, Van Gross, MD also paces and exhibits circling behavior, characteristic of the deranged in preparation for his next radio, lecture or writing gig. So, the Five Books of Van Gross’s covers important years in the Aughts, in this lead up to this retro Roaring decade. And don’t worry, Van Gross, MD has material for follow up works for other intercurrent years in this wild and wacky 21st century. It’s kind of crazy, but many of the same characters from the Aughts somehow resurface today. Karzai, Rudy, Bidey, Kerry, Iranians, Climate Players and even versions of Bush and The Cheney Man. We’re just doing reruns!! But I’ve got a book for that (in the works supplementing if not magnifying the mega-impact of the Five Books collection).

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Copyright © 2021 by Kenneth Bruce Van Gross, MD

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 12/07/2021

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Contents

Prologue

1997

441

Mother Teresa, Di, And Mobutu

The Driver Drank

Amanda

The Blind Man Smiled

New Tax Law Revives an Incentive to Develop Drugs to Fight Rare Diseases

Mad Cow Disease: What are These Animals Doing—Saying Moo Out of Context or Thinking Larry Flynt is A Priest or Something?

Brain Breakthroughs—Is This Title Nuts or What?

Looking

Hamburger Helper

Paula Jones: No, I Do Not Smell Refund

Alou

Guess Terry Won’t Be Going To Diana’s Funeral

If Medicine Were Run Like The Law

Headless Frog Tapped To Lead Major League Baseball

Seinfeld Confesses: My Show Is About Something

Carroll O’connor Found To Be Cosby’s Daughter

Autumn Jackson Shocker: I’m Just A Fall Guy

United States To Pay Hospitals To Train Fewer Doctors To Reduce Glut

The Story Of Bobby Bonilla

Marv Albert: An American Tale

Interspecies Sexual Harassment

Black Men (Tall)/White Women (Blonde)

Tuskegee—1992

Retribution

Magic

Tuskegee—1932

Med Rap Verse 1: Hey Nigger Gimme Dat Baffroom Key

Med Rap Verse 2: Hypoxic Vulsion

Med Rap Verse 3: Allergy King

Med Rap Verse 4: Let Duh Hoes Go

Primal Neuroanthropology

1998

There Was A Time

Jazz Me, Baby

Disease

The Current

Bono and Kennedy

Epilogue

Dave Barry Discovered To Be Dyslexic Jewish Kid Named Barry David

The Frosted Flakes Paraneoplastic Syndrome

Parkinson’s Disease

Headaches

Zo—Heat’s Superhot Reactor

City of Mania, City of Depression

1999

Cybernation In Hibernation

New York Superstars-(Speech To New Healthcare College Graduates)

Sociological Psychosis In American Teens—A New Clinical Entity For The 1990s And The Approaching Millennium

Hurricane Horse Race (University Of Miami Basketball)

Rose

Wonder Man At The Super Bowl

Shit Got To Happen

It’s The ’90s

Rock Me Back ’60s Style

Poet Of The ’70s

Dis Be The ’80s

Dis Be America

Niggers on A Rampage

JFK Jr. and The Princess—A Fable

Ode To Birdsong

Egyptian Pre-Mummification

Nation Death Redux

Burdens To Bear

Tantalizing Cruelty

Ode To The Kennedys

All Living Things

Bonfire Of The Vanities

As The World Ends: November 1999 Precognition Of 9/11

Doing Versus Being

2000

Life

1963

Elian

Elian Aftermath

Cuba 2000: A Separate Reality

Idiot Land, USA

Stifled Heat

Randomness and Themes

The Meaning of Adultery

Neurofusion

Surviving Religion

Prostitution and Cops and Swingers Demand Retaliation

Society Declared Officially Psychotic with Tobacco Verdict

New Syrian President has Vision for His Nation

Morales

Jews Found in America

This Olympic Moment

Mets and Yankees Prose Commentary

Game 1: Subway Series Poetry

The Jews and Their God

In The Kingdom of Nothing

Diabolicalizing In Watts

Playboy Mansion

Unchartered Waters

Requiem for Elian’s Mother

Sally Hemings: African American

A Halloween Presidential Tale: Gore Dies; Campaign Manager Predicts Victory

Bush and Gore, Gore and Bush

And Counting or Recounting A Million Fragments

Cheney Dead. Bush Says He is That Much More Stable.

On The National Election Tie

Bob Jones University Admission Questionnaire

Of Jesse, South Florida, Chads, The Presidency, and The Cameraman With The Brain Tumor

Bush Selects Walt Whitman as Head of The Environmental Protection Agency and Janet Ashcroft as Attorney General

Late 2000 Epilogue

Dialyze This

2001

An American In Miami—January 2001

Texas Textbook Board To Set Up Shop Where Lee Used To Shoot—May 2001

Southfield

Troy

Grosse Pointe

Dearborn

Ann Arbor 1

Ann Arbor 2

Jackson

Lansing

Zoo

Benton Harbor and St. Joseph and The Story of Race and Sports in America

Grand Rapids

Philly

Flint

Hitchhiking from Saginaw to Miami

Tim’s To Do List

Civil Rights Commission Report and Minority Aids

Tree Struck by Lightning; Bush Also Killed

In The Contrived World of The Haves

Chandra and The Attempts To Reconcile The Invasion of Certain Brunettes

The Seeds of Creativity

The Only Difference Between A Madman And Me Is That I Am Not Mad.

Chicago Beckons

Rowshinin Creation

Reggae on My People

Inside The Bubble

Pompano, Florida Nursing Home and Mission of Morpheus

Jamaica

Miami Dies of Terminal Uniqueness

Balloonist Fails To Circle Globe for Fifth Time

Millennial Summer—Three Weeks Before 9/11

An American Neurologist—Neurologist of The Americas

Asynchrony—September 7, 2001

The Definition Of Dirty—September 7, 2001

Fantasie Impromptu Obsceno—Late September 2001

Sammy Sosa Discovered To Be Eighty-Two Years Old

The Death of The Yankees as Metaphor for The Destruction of The Twin Towers

An American Neurologist Comes Home

The Introduction of A Turkish Military Song Into Beethoven’s 9TH Symphony

Novelty and The Trade Center Tragedy

The Walking Man—or Is It The Running Away Man Cringing in Physical Agony?

Richard Reid—Airhead

2002

The Story of Nothing

The Deification of Muhammed Ali

Super Sunday 2002

An American Neurologist—Manhattan

September 11 and The Induction of Meaning Into American Culture

Out-Freuding Freud (With Precognition About 2020 Pharmacotherapy)

Queen Mother—A Suicide Bomber

Cops and Prostitution

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Racing Down Okeechobee in The Chariot Laced With Middle Eastern Holy Fuel

Okeechobee Women

Stream

Baby Boom Generation—Musical Revolutionaries and Change Freaks

2003

Black Reality on Martian Luther King Day

Al Franken Induces Multicity Coma with New Radio Show

Rose Admits To Gambling . . . Then Is Executed

Bill Bradley Determined To Be In Advanced Coma; Al Franken Officially Pronounced Brain Dead During Radio Program

Memory’s Nonexistence and Existence

SARS (Precognition Of The 2020 Pandemic)

The Owl of Sweetwater

Bush Sets March 40TH Deadline

Folks

Inside The Bubble

Baltimore

Liberia

The Dust Bowl of Race

Cheney Pacemaker Working Just Fine: Cheney However, Conceivably Dead

Tina

The Iranian Twins

Emergence From Coma

Sexcapade 2003

The Folly Of Tracking 9/11 Funding

Celebrity Neurology

Bush Declares War on Mr. Rogers

Tuesday’s Dead

No Terrorism In Power Outage

Boxcar Stowaway in Full Flight or Chuck, Chuck, Bo Buck, Banana Fana Knucklehead

A Philosophical View

Team of A Thousand Improvisational Riffs Versus A Monument To The American Tradition of Trying and Losing

Cyberdown Dangerland

It’s Getting Hot in Here

2004

Century of Death

3

Soaked USA

A Decade Later in The USA

Nation of The Damned: Cuba

The Meaning of Children

Epilogue

Dedicated to Amanda Rae Gross, Jason Matthew Gross, ex-wives and

the people living and dead who created and inspired

Kenneth Bruce Van Gross of Monte Cristo

Van Gross of Monte Cristo uses satire and parody in the included written pieces contained within to sardonically comment upon notable public figures, companies, organizations, groups and countries. Any other use of real names in a satirical manner in the stories and poems herein is accidental and coincidental.

-Kenneth Bruce Van Gross, MD

Prologue

Race, Sex, Sports, Religion, The Political and Ethnic Divide, Celebrity, Science, Healthcare, The Brain/Mind Interface, Philosophy, History, Music, International Relations

All of these areas evoke prejudice. The challenge is to identify the mine fields, explore them, analyze them, ponder change or simply acknowledge there will be differences.

Where outlandish meets harsh opinion, where controversy collides with incendiary ideation, where the surreal and the absurd embrace so goes Van Gross of Monte Cristo.

Bob Marley spoke of fighting against -ism and schism. Van Gross, MD will take the battle there but first he must identify each iz and skiz.

There can be pain via such identification should there be some ribald humor, Lenny Brucian jams, vulgarity, rudeness or downright wrong thinking. However, this is part and parcel of the Van Gross MD’s dissection and exposé of his own flawed mind and that of our highfalutin’ thought leaders or local riff raff.

The war against narrow-mindedness is an uphill struggle. Van Gross, MD knows that well through the many venues he paddled through from 1997 to 2004 sampled in these pages. He has been at war against those who have stifled him or have attempted to do so. And he has been at war with himself. But haven’t we all, trying to navigate through this world of extreme progressions, regressions and inertia?

Aaron Neville sang Tell It Like It Is,. Walter Cronkite said, And that’s the way it is and Gil Noble had a Frontline style interview show called Like It Is.

Kenneth Bruce Van Gross, MD/Van Gross of Monte Cristo wants to labor in that tradition in this wide ranging literary endeavor that not only includes opinion pieces but those that attempt to educate readers, plays with their hot buttons and help stimulate new ideas. Poetry will surprise and streams of consciousness will tell lies or speak truth to beauty.

Play it maestro, all night long.

Kenneth Bruce Van Gross, M.D.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

November 2021

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1997

441

441

The drive

The palm trees

The stark Latin quality

The farmland in the midst of the bourgeoisie developments

Traveling down 441 (State Road 7) carries a special number feel

441 is divisible by the magic number 9; and 7 is oh so prime

What a unique side trip to the real beauty of Florida

An escape from the Florida of malls and pseudo lakes and vapid gated communities

441 is poverty

441 is nature

441 is dangerous

441 is mine

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Mother Teresa, Di, And Mobutu

They’re all dead so spin the wheel

They can’t hear you ’cause their ears are concealed

They can’t see you ’cause their eyes are shot

That’s OK ’cause if your body stays hot

It says a lot

’Bout

Who you are

And

Who

You are not

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The Driver Drank

The driver drank

And waited for the couple

The decoy would depart

And the driver would drive

Intoxicated

Enchanted by their playfulness

And then their moans of pleasure

Accelerating in volume

As he pressed down his foot

Harder

Stronger

Louder

He reached 120

They climaxed

He careened

They died

He died

49556.png

Amanda

Saw a movie tonight.

Contact.

My daughter cried before I went

And I cried when I left.

David Morse was her father

And the doctor with heart on St. Elsewhere.

He died in the movie

And I die a thousand times when I think of my

Amanda feeling deserted by me.

Am I the doctor with heart

Who left his daughter?

I see a light.

My doctor days are not over

And I will never abandon Amanda.

49558.png

The Blind Man Smiled

The blind man smiled.

He told his tale.

I sat in quietude.

His woman listened

And then opined

She did not add

She simply magnified.

He brought me back

To days when I would get the history.

It was my profession.

It was my life.

And I would hate it

And I would love it.

He had seizures and he was blind

And he was a musician and he was a divorce lawyer

And he was American and he was Venezuelan

And he was rich and he was poor.

And he was a victim and he was a survivor.

And then there was a hint that I felt from the

Ability I will never lose—

That there was something I needed to know more about

His brother.

Yes, he had seizures and blindness too.

My instincts were embedded

I seized on the familial link—but not blindly.

For I am disenfranchised but not destroyed.

I will not lose who I am.

I needed to know more.

His perinatal history.

Yes, he and his brother were both premature

And experienced intrauterine trauma.

But don’t we all.

And then we are born.

Blind and needing music to set us free.

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New Tax Law Revives an Incentive to Develop Drugs to Fight Rare Diseases

Several patients with garden variety heart attacks expressed chagrin that while rare disease drug research gets a tax break, nobody is offering any drug company money through tax incentives to develop drugs that would combat their mundane condition.

I’m so upset, said a common heart attack victim, that I could have a heart attack. When advised that she already had a heart attack, the victim showed even more anger by offering to generate a rare disease in the reporter’s face that included the rare presence of spit from a common heart attack victim’s mouth.

In a move that has fooled few of their attending physicians, several of these heart attack victims have resorted to barking and flailing their arms so doctors would suspect we came down with rare neurological diseases like Tourette’s syndrome and Huntington’s chorea. Then we’d really have a rare disease, said a spokesperson, Tourette’s-Huntington’s-heart attack syndrome. We should get a cure-all chest pain drug out of that in no time—and maybe we’d get a piece of that tax credit action too, he continued, popping another partially effective nitroglycerine.

Other individuals liken what they perceive as the orphan drug credit gravy train in more sinister ways. The following plot was overheard. We come up with this ‘laughing disease.’ Hundreds of us dupe our HMOs into pouring in millions to ‘treat’ us with ineffective drugs. Then we get a drug company to develop this fancy-schmancy drug that ‘stabilizes’ our rare disease. They get a tax credit for developing what amounts to a sugar pill, but they dress up the research and development costs into the billions. We then pocket a nice chunk of the windfall they make selling the drug to our HMOs, who, since we have a rare disease, have to supply the drug to us for free as a stipulation of our contract. You know, we’re these desperately poor rare disease victims—hahaha.

Then we go for the coup de grace. We need an additional rare disease drug to be developed for times when the laughing is intensified, like when our accomplices are depositing our money in the bank.

I can just see the headline, said the schemer, ‘With New Drugs, Rare Disease No Laughing Matter Anymore.’

49562.png

Mad Cow Disease: What are These Animals Doing—Saying Moo Out of Context or Thinking Larry Flynt is A Priest or Something?

Ever wonder why it wasn’t a horse that jumped over the moon? I think cows have been acting crazy for a long time, but everyone would write off their behavior to some repressed calfhood experience involving udders.

Actually, there has been a known neurological disorder in cows where they start walking funny, in dance-like fashion like people do when they have Huntington’s chorea. So some genius has decided that cows that walk funny may hold clues to the cause of Huntington’s chorea. Another breakthrough? I love when these breakthroughs come along. Unfortunately, the patients with no cures for their Huntington’s disease (all of them) would like to throw some scientist over the moon. They found the gene for Huntington’s too from analyzing the population of a Venezuelan village where people were doing the mambo to the sound of nothing. Really it did take a village, and now we need to do gene testing on that jester who came up with the macarena. Another dance-like disease is St. Vitus Dance, which is a sequela to rheumatic fever. Boogie down your temperature, y’all.

By the way, Huntington’s is in effect the opposite of Parkinson’s. Too much movement versus too little movement. Guess which neurochemical system is revved up in Huntington’s? Give me a D, give me an O, give me a P, give me an A. What do you got? You know you are an idiot.

Chorea—choreography—you know, the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre where all the guys used to be waiters and just love the way you do your hair.

j

Back to the breakthroughs—please, this is serious knowledge here. There are people in England having mad cow burgers who make Ronnie Reagan seem like a rocket scientist.

That’s right—mad cow disease starts out with cows grazing on their heads and then yelping, Oom, oom, or the like and then getting themselves turned into chuck steak, which then is eaten by some bloke who, over several years, starts thinking Winston Churchill is his mother.

Congratulations—you have mastered the disease transmission and clinical pathogenesis of mad cow disease.

But there is more, Don Pardo—where do the cows get the disease from? Eating other cows with the same disease or eating sick sheep. It’s sheep, my dear Watson. Cows that get mad cow disease got it from eating sheep brains, which contain a microorganism (a type of virus). When the contaminated beef is then eaten by Ringo’s cousin, dementia, or the inability to think normally, begins to set in by destroying the human’s brain, eventually killing the person within a few years.

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Brain Breakthroughs—Is

This Title Nuts or What?

Chapter 1: NEUROSIS—IT’S DUE TO THE PRESENCE OF THIS BRAIN GENE

Ever wonder why Woody Allen or this constant complainer in your building are the way they are? Well, there has been some wild and crazy gene research recently that shows that there is a gene that controls the brain chemistry of serotonin. That’s the chemical that Prozac works on (maybe you’re actually taking the stuff).

Now, for those of you who are not molecular biologists (I guess that is at least three million of you out of the four billion reading this book), the genes we have in our body are basically the same in each cell in the body, and that includes the brain cells that make serotonin. Voila, you just mastered step one in Neurochemical Genetics 101 in this course directed by moi. And a defect in serotonin chemistry can participate in creating depression and neurosis.

Sooooooo . . . some people like the Wood Man and other neurotics like him may have this brain serotonin gene that is different from the one in totally non-neurotic you and me!

So what you say? So what? Are you some kind of anti-scientist? Don’t you see the implications of this breakthrough?

Funny, I don’t either, except that this kind of research is linked to the late ’90s kind that has recently shown that there is a gene for novelty-seeking behavior that involves the brain chemical dopamine, which is low in Parkinson’s disease.

Now, you may be asking yourself—OK, your grandmother’s uncle by a previous marriage has Parkinson’s disease, what in God’s name does having Parkinson’s disease have to do with novelty-seeking behavior?

His wife was the novelty seeker in marrying that loser.

Don’t you have any common sense? Don’t you understand the new total understanding brain breakthroughs have made in totally explaining the way our minds work? You are clearly a remnant of the seventeenth century when people didn’t even know Parkinson’s disease existed let alone know it had some connection to the gene for novelty-seeking behavior.

Can you imagine living then? People would go to novelty shops and not have even an iota of an idea that their behavior had something to do with dopamine! They didn’t even know what dopamine was. They were dopes!

Don’t get me started again. You don’t know what dopamine is either?

OK—dopamine is this brain chemical that is all over the brain that involves the control of some of our movements and behaviors. Pop quiz—name a brain chemical that is involved in depression and neurosis. Dum dom dum dum, dum dom dummmm, dum dam dum dam daaam, dadudududu (that’s the Jeopardy theme) . . . Wrong. It is not French vanilla—it’s serotonin! (Remember genes, neurosis, Prozac, from what you read a half hour ago?)

You know it’s funny (what do you mean unlike this book?) that dopamine is not a street drug like the usual and customary drugs you can get on the corner called dope. But it is chemically similar to some of those drugs like cocaine and amphetamines. Also if you have a revved-up dopamine brain circuit, you start having wild extra movements like Robert De Niro when he OD’d on dopamine in that movie Awakenings. Remember he was being treated for Parkinson’s disease and he was moving in excess after not moving at all when Robin Williams gave him too much levodopa (the precursor of dopamine available as a pill). There’s a guy anyone would trust as a doctor—Robin Williams. Could you see this guy in the consultation room doing sixteen different imitations in succession and then telling you that he thinks you need psychotherapy?

So look at this—you just learned that dopamine replacement in the brain is a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, that too much dopamine causes Robert De Niro, when he is a make-believe Parkinson’s disease patient, to move around too much, and now I’m throwing this breakthrough at you about some novelty-seeking gene also involved with dopamine?

Forget the novelty-seeking gene breakthrough. Like most of what you read in our wonderful media, it only confuses things.

Speaking of confusion—a revved-up dopamine system is the key neurochemical formulation for our understanding of schizophrenia.

But want to really be confused? A revved-up dopamine system is also felt to be responsible for excessive slot machine use in Las Vegas! That’s right—something called reward behavior is related to the dopamine system in our brains.

Now, hasn’t the wonderful world of neuroscience really clarified things for you? Now you understand why Robert De Niro was in that movie Casino after he did Awakenings. He had all this extra dopamine in his brain that drew him to Vegas!

And Nicolas Cage—why do you think he was Leaving Las Vegas?

You got it, genius—not enough dopamine because of all the bad psychoactive substances he was using! (True—low dopamine can be linked to depression; low serotonin can contribute to suicidality.) Have a fun day!

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Looking

There is a primal scene outside my window. It is a scene where men with metal bars smack white balls off the infinite green landscape and majestic birds wade through a cove peering down for swimming prey.

The men travel in a cart with others. Some are old. Some are young. All, like the birds, express determination—they must advance the white ball to the west, only west—for there must be a goal there. They leave the cart to plant themselves erect, grasping the bar with both hands as if to dig the short grass beneath them. They flex their knees, trunk club in hands, standing over the ball, and then uncoil in a violent twisting motion as the bar is extended above, behind, and then in contact with the white sphere after which their eyes pursue its flight west toward the goal.

A great blue heron is planted in the ankle-deep water. He eyes the fish beneath the surface. He is motionless, frozen in time, eyeing down his catch the way he did as a dinosaur roaming the plain. Then he strikes with a rapid descent of his long beak, tossing the fish north, always north to the shore, where it squirms and flips and then lies motionless on the short grass beneath him. His goal is attained. He eats the kill.

The ball must die at the goal. The men with the clubs must destroy it there or bury it in the ground.

Not all men strike the ball from the short grass. Some balls land in sand near the cove. Upon striking the ball off this terrain, the sand showers west in a grand spray of beige particles. The ball often does not move far the way it towers high when struck off the short grass. The sands of time are not kind to man.

There is danger in the cove. Ducks huddle near it, a few yards from the sands, peering south to a ripple midstream. They view a scaled reptilian head floating relentlessly west. But there is more than but a head—there is a body of an alligator attached beneath it.

The ducks scatter as they fixate on the ominous beast and hear the plodding of the men searching for the white sphere near the sand.

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Hamburger Helper

The shocking problem of Escherichia coli infestation into hamburger meat is disturbing the fast-food generation but is opportunity for a wonderful educational session about infectious disease.

The great news is that E. coli (fondly nicknamed Eschie by friends) will not convert fully to lower case and reprise e. e. cummings and will not duplicate the slow dementia comic stylings of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy virus contaminating British meat; the not-so-great news is that E. coli blood infection can kill you.

Of course, that would usually mean you did not take antibiotics to counteract it. E. coli is eminently treatable with antibiotics and, in the vast number of cases, can be totally eradicated if it gets into your gastrointestinal tract via some barbecue treat.

What is funny about having even a minor case of diarrhea from E. coli? Not much, but think of the learning experience!

You basically need to know that there are four major types of microscopic things floating around that can infect you: bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. Here are some key features:

Bacteria. Antibiotics kill most of them! That’s the deal—no mystical nutritional therapy or spine manipulation is required. George Washington died from a bacterial infection in his throat, which they used to ineffectively treat by bloodletting. Barbers used to remove the blood after a vein incision, which is why they have red on those barber poles.

Viruses. As we know from HIV, drug therapy for these tiniest of microorganisms is not particularly good. It is hard to kill viruses with drugs. Prevention is the best approach, which is why we get vaccinated against those childhood viral infections such as measles and mumps. Recently, a chicken pox vaccine has been developed; the hepatitis vaccine has been quite effective in preventing hepatitis, which means liver inflammation (duhh).

Parasites. Amebiasis and giardia are organisms that are categorized as protozoan tropical parasites—they are larger than bacteria, and you get them from street vendors in Mexico but rarely encounter these treatable but sickening characters in this country. I am talking about the parasites, not the Mexican street vendors. Treatment is not fun—as pills can be huge and can sicken you while your GI system is being sickened by amebiasis.

Fungi. Also not fun to have. Aspergillosis (striking the lungs) is a prototype occasionally noted in immunocompromised hosts (people debilitated by AIDS or cancer). Antifungal medication does work, but because the immune system of the patient is often