A New Prognosis on Long Haul Covid Plus Whistler's Mean Mandolin Playing Mother

 August 14, 2021

   While Kathy, Uno and myself were in Greer I had a telemed conference scheduled with a highly recommended neurosurgeon. There was only one problem.

BBB and Uno in front of Greer Lodge

Cabin #97

   Uno loved this cabin because on the other side was a small island just for him to pee on. We didn't have Wi-Fi at the cabin, so I had to walk down to the Greer library where they had a Wi-Fi tower to do a Zoom call for the doctor meeting. The upshot of the telemed conference call is that my new doctor doesn't believe my symptoms are Covid related. She is scheduling a series of brain and spine scans for me next week. She also asked me if I had any spinal injuries in the past and I confessed I raced motorcycles in my youth and I once had a hard fall on my patootie, and later I had a sciatica episode back in 1984 when I needed to ride a horse in the Phoenix Jaycees Rodeo Parade and a doctor told me then I had the spine of a 63-year-old-man. The doctor laughed and said, she was four-years-old at the time! The same age as Deena! Oh, man. Kids today. God bless them. All I've got to say is if my spine was 63 in 1984, it's pretty damn mature by now.

   And, speaking of Barrow's Nuerological Institute, Kathy's mother, Betty Radina, was the head nurse there at the inception of the institute. Here she is in all her Head Nurse glory.

Betty Radina and the Barrow's Crew, 1967

She is in the second row from the top,

third from the left.

Most people don't know that James Abbott McNeill Whistler's mother was a mean mandolin player.

"Whistler's Mean Mandolin Playing Mother"

  Of course, that is a joke. As a pose, Whistler's Mother is a classic trope that looks more like this:

Daily Whip Out:

"Whistler's Mother's Traditional"

  But when I see her, I see a mandolin crazed mamacita. Meanwhile, I also see other crazed mamacitas because, that is my predilection.

Daily Whip Out: "Miss Crazy Spent"

  Of course, none of this has anything to do with this.

William Penn's Head

  Yes, that's Fred Ullberg, a worker at the Tacony Iron Works with the head of Alexander Milne Calder's statue of William Penn, 1893, which ended up as a 37-foot-statue of Penn at the Philadelphia City Hall. Illustrating the fact that a big, fat cowboy hat on an oversized head, is not a new thing, man.

“It will take some clever appraisal on your part, but your clothes should express value without extravagance, warmth without being brazen, and understanding without looking like Whistler's Mother.”

—Anne Fogarty, "Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife"