When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls and the mist lays low on the fen then like Brigadoon (but every 50 years) from the fog come missives from ’mates not heard from since long ago. 


But first about me: Before I retired I engaged the Swiss company where I worked to lease a marble quarry in Vermont to an Italian company that was in the marble-for-memorials business. This marble is not suited for the Swiss company’s products. The quarry was discovered in the 1700s and used intermittently until 1904, after which it has been in continual use. I wanted this wonderful white marble to be available for use in our military cemeteries. (See the news link www.cbnews.com/vodeo/watch?id=736766n for what I mean.) The Swiss lease a quarry in America to the Italians to dig up marble to sell to the Army for tombstones for folks who died after serving all over the world. Is this a great county or what?


Now about you: Dr. Rodney Regestein vents a bit on healthcare. “The debt ceiling crisis suggests democracy works better for small, homogeneous populations. Increased differences in cultural mores across local populations bring an increased chance of irreconcilable national disagreements. This problem gets aggravated by globalization and immigration. We all need to step out of our comfort zones enough to live together.


“I and all my colleagues in our hospital’s outpatient psychiatry clinic were laid off two-and-a-half years ago. The hospital tossed the old ways of taking care of patients to bring costs down. The legal milieu meant firing everybody and then taking applications for places in the reformed organization. The news keeps shouting that U.S. healthcare expenses are double those of any other nation. Morbidity and mortality rates peg us at about the 50th healthiest country. Fully half of illness is self-induced, which makes this a psychiatric problem. Death statistics document a high prevalence of heart attacks, but this really means a high prevalence of indolent couch potatoes who live on chips, caffeine and rich desserts. The obesity epidemic has also induced a diabetes epidemic. For the first time ever the younger generation may have a shorter life span than its parents. (This would mean Social Security projections might not be as bad as planners think!)


“This problem fits in with our lousy education and lopsided income distribution. Few educated people smoke. Compared with poor people, middle-class people tend to exercise and control their weight. Patients tend to underreport their eats and over-report how much they exercise, so doctors can’t easily measure patients’ actual diet or caloric expenditure. I’m trying to find a cheap, convenient way to measure how many calories people spend as they live their routine lives. I and my MIT collaborators must find the right way to analyze the output of a wristwatch-sized activity monitor that records body movements. We’ll have to raise capital to produce a clinical product. But what a market!”


—John M. Mitchell, 300 Grove St., Rutland, VT 05710; (802) 775-3716; jmm00033@comcast.net