… at a State Department memorial ceremony today can be found here.

Adkins, a George Washington University graduate, was killed on his first diplomatic mission for the Foreign Service.

There’s a Martello Tower in Key West. Dates from the Civil War.

When UD visited it, she thought of the much more famous Martello Tower on the Irish coast, the tower in which James Joyce briefly lived. He made it the setting of the opening scene of Ulysses.

The last time UD was in Ireland, she stood on top of the tower and looked out over the snotgreen sea.

In Key West, she stood below the tower, looking at Florida’s sky-blue sea. She chatted with one of the gardeners at the Key West Garden Club about how most of the planting around the tower was only a few years old. “Last hurricane really wiped us out. Only the biggest palms survived.”

But even as she spoke with the gardener, UD thought of Stephen Dedalus waking up in his tower to begin his journey through one day and one night. She heard Buck Mulligan say The aunt thinks you killed your mother. She heard Dedalus say Someone killed her.

UD‘s head it simply swirls with that novel, and she’s not alone. Every year hordes of people all over the world honor Ulysses on Bloomsday, June 16, the day the story takes place.

Mark your calendar.

A poster from last year’s Bloomsday in Brazil.

… Easily Distracted, you’re bound to be a laptops-in-the-classroom enthusiast.

Monsieur Burke makes his case here.

Honiton poet Iris J Danning has penned some verses to welcome frozen food chain Iceland back to the town. Pensioner Mrs Danning says she was unable to purchase frozen onion for stews in Honiton for the three years Iceland was absent from the town centre.

“I wrote the poem to welcome Iceland back,” she said.

“I definitely think Iceland will be an asset to Honiton.”

Her poem was handed to Iceland manager Belinda Bodley on the store’s opening day, April 16.

Mrs Danning’s poem starts:

It’s just over three years since you moved away

We’ve all been looking forward to this big day

My fridge is empty, my freezer is bare

So I’m going to stock up with goodies to put in there.

… in this morning’s New York Times that he insisted on reading them aloud across the breakfast table to UD.

1.) The managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is a notorious letch. A French satirist, Stéphane Guillon, describes a recent visit of his to Radio France:

To prepare for Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s entry into the building at Radio France, Mr. Guillon said, “exceptional measures have been taken in order not to awaken the beast,” including the banning of high heels and leather pants. The head of publicity would greet him in a burqa, and “at the sound of a siren, Stage 5 of the alert system, all female workers must be evacuated.”

2.)

… Germany takes a highly regimented approach to naming. Children’s names must be approved by local authorities, and there is a reference work, the International Handbook of Forenames, to guide them. Jürgen Udolph, a University of Leipzig professor and head of the information center there that provides certificates of approval for names that have not yet made the official list, said that “the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames.”

There are sixteen.

Background here.

La Kid as…

… Batgirl.

UD thanks her sister for forwarding the photo.

… said my aunt, “became more and more preoccupied with Big Bang-type questions as he got older.  Why is there something?  What is nothing?  A colleague of his at NIH was a religious Jew, and your father respected this man, and they had long conversations about belief…”

For most of his life, I guess my father had, along with his faith in science, what Richard Rorty means by a religion of art.  My father’s two cultures were empirical clarity and aesthetic mystery.

Friedrich von Schelling calls beauty “infinity represented in a finite way.”  I suppose my father’s yearnings toward the infinite were no different from anyone else’s.  They might have been more intense than other people’s.  After all, if he were here he’d probably remind me that the realm of science contains its own soul-enthralling depths.

Given his family background, though, science would always be the great liberation for him, making it impossible for him to invest his yearnings in any creed.

*********************************

Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s book about religion, and he quotes Eagleton:

What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? … [Religion’s] subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.

Like Christopher Lasch toward the end of his life, Eagleton represents a man of the left for whom one particular symbolic form — progress, liberal enlightenment — has failed in its promise to encompass human yearnings. What Fish calls “the tragedy and pain of the human condition,” and humanity’s yearning for “a transfigured future” (the phrase is Eagleton’s), is far more compelling to Eagleton at this point than political, as well as scientific, efforts to relieve our pain.

********************************

Update, correction:

A blog is a beautiful thing. I just received an email from a reader in response to my tale of the Czech Torah. The email’s titled They Weren’t Unburied Torahs, and it includes an attachment titled Memorial Scrolls Trust, Westminster Synagogue, Kent House, Rutland Gardens, London.

… Fearful that the deserted synagogues and community buildings would be at the mercy of looters and plunderers, a group of Jews at the Jewish Museum in occupied Prague submitted a plan to the Nazis to save the Jewish ritual and cultural treasures in the vulnerable buildings by bringing them to the museum in Prague so that they could be catalogued and preserved. Why their Nazi overseers accepted the plan is not known. The result was that the Nazi controlled Prague Jewish Community sent out the orders that implemented the plan and permitted the transport companies to carry Jewish goods. With a few exceptions, the Torah Scrolls, other liturgical treasures in gold and silver and ritual textiles were sent to Prague, along with historic archives and thousands of books. The remaining Jews were deported in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and quite a number of these late deportees survived.

… [I]n 1956, the Michle Synagogue, in the suburbs of Prague, became the warehouse at which the hundreds of Torah Scrolls were consolidated from various locations. They had come from the large Prague Jewish community and from the many smaller communities that were scattered across what was left of Bohemia and Moravia, after the Sudetenland had been detached. The Scrolls in the Michle Synagogue did not include Scrolls from Slovakia, which was under a separate administration.

… Eric Estorick, an American art dealer living in London, paid many visits to Prague on business in the early 1960’s and got to know Prague artists, whose work he sold at his Grosvenor Gallery. Being a frequent visitor to Prague, he came to the attention of the authorities, and, on a visit in 1963 he expressed some interest in a catalogue of Hebraica. He was approached by officials from Artia, the state corporation responsible for trade in works of art, and asked if he would be interested in buying some Torah Scrolls.

Unknown to him, the Israelis had been approached previously with a similar offer, but the negotiations had come to nothing. Estorick was taken to the Michle Synagogue were he was faced with wooden racks holding about 1800 Scrolls, in seriously damp conditions. He was asked if he wanted to make an offer. He replied that he knew certain parties in London who might be interested.

On his return to London, he contacted a fellow American, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, of the Westminster Synagogue, one of whose congregants, Ralph Yablon, offered to put up the money to buy the Scrolls. First, Chimen Abramsky, who was to become Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of London, was asked to go to Prague for twelve days in November 1963 to examine the Scrolls and to report on their authenticity and condition. On his return to London, it was decided that Estorick should go to Prague and negotiate a deal, which he did. Two trucks laden with 1564 Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in February and March 1964.

After months of sorting, examining and cataloguing each Scroll, the task of distributing them began, with the aim of getting the Scrolls back into the life of Jewish congregations across the world. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to carry out this task.

UD‘s enormously grateful to her reader for this information.

… that today’s the fiftieth anniversity of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay, she thinks first about her father.

An immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, a first-generation American embarrassed by the peasant religion his Jewish father brought from Minsk, Herbert Rapp was a belligerent empiricist.

While UD‘s mother – herself the daughter of secular Jews in the same generationally rebellious mode as UD‘s father – retained enough faith to send her children to a Reform temple in Bethesda for a few years, UD‘s father was much the stronger influence on UD.

This was in part because of his clear, principled world view, in contrast to his wife’s vague sentimentalism, but it also had to do with the soullessness of that particular temple, a hip epicenter of social justice. (I called my mother’s sister and asked her about it. “That place? The rabbi didn’t believe in God.”)

Once, my mother and my aunt, in memory of their father, decided to buy a Torah for the synagogue. The rabbi told them about some recently unearthed Czech Torahs that had been buried for safekeeping during the war.

“Your mother,” said my aunt, “went to the airport to pick it up when it came in. The next day we took it to the rabbi. He said ‘You didn’t have to bring it in so fast. You could have kept it in your home for awhile.’ Your mother said, ‘No. I didn’t like the ghosts.’ The rabbi looked at both of us and said ‘You’re pagans.'”

I have a memory – who knows if the memory is real – of my father, with great reluctance, attending the installation ceremony at the temple. As the new Torah was carried joyously through the congregation, the person holding it stopped in front of my father, assuming he in particular — after all, his family bought it — would want to kiss it. My father stood stolid and unmoving. (“I don’t remember the ceremony,” says my aunt.)

Yet he didn’t have the materialist disposition you’d think might accompany all this. He was mad for the Romantic poets, and he liked to recite T.S. Eliot. My mother says she fell in love with him because of the classical music she heard pouring out of his frat room at Johns Hopkins. He was a serious and emotional pianist who spent much of his time playing and replaying the Sonata Pathétique.  He loved nature intensely — in particular, the Chesapeake Bay, where he had a house and a boat.

***********************

End of first half.  Must walk dog.  It’s high noon, and even though it’s dreary out there, I guess this is as light and warm as it’s going to get.  Ne quittez pas.

Well, yes, when people die because dangerous drugs have won approval based on lies medical school professors in the pay of drug companies have told about them, that’s certainly a disservice.

Prominent cardiologist Dr Marvin Konstam (Tufts University Medical Center, Boston, MA) agreed to be lead author on a 2001 Circulation paper about the COX-2 inhibitor rofecoxib (Vioxx, Merck), which was written in-house by Merck scientists, according to claims made in a federal court in Australia last week. The paper was designed to deflect safety criticisms, some experts believe, following the publication of an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) two months previously that first demonstrated an increase in cardiovascular side effects with the drug.

This is very significant, says Dr Steve Nissen (Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio), who was an author on the JAMA paper. “During the three years after publication of the Konstam manuscript, millions of patients around the world were prescribed rofecoxib by physicians who believed that the drug was safe. In this case, a ghostwritten article caused great harm to the public health.”

Pretty ugly stuff, huh? Only comes out when there’s a big lawsuit from the injured… or their survivors.

But think of it from Konstam’s perspective. He makes money, gets another publication, and doesn’t have to lift a finger.

***********************

UPDATE: Colin, a reader, adds important information to this post. UD is very grateful. It goes without saying that these are enormously complicated stories, and UD is happy to pass along details, amendments, etc.

Merck pulled the drug the day after an internal study – much like the kind attacked above – found that taking the drug for more than 18 months in a row raised the risk of cardiac problems. This is also true of other drugs in the class – but only Merck reacted, and thus exposed itself to all the lawsuits, most of which, by the way, they have won; the other drugs remain on sale. (As a side note, the FDA asked Merck to sell Vioxx with a new warning label, and the company refused.) I very much take the point about ghost-writing, but in the case of Vioxx the system did work: professional scientists employed by a drug company conducted a scientific study, reported its negative results to management, and action was taken promptly despite the huge financial consequences. None of this, of course, answers the point about academic scientists putting their names to things they did not write, but I still think it’s important to have all the facts of the case.

… was in his ditched car.

Looks more and more likely that he’s made, as some wag said of Elvis, a good career move.

Pharmaceutical multinationals know best. They formulate great new drugs and want nothing more than to drop them immediately

into our eager mouths. Testing and approval, a bother, may be avoided in a variety of ways, including fabricating your own scientific journal full of fake research touting the greatness of the drugs.

… Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website…

… I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher, wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus.

… [An] Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks … served on the “honorary advisory board” of this “journal”. His take: “I don’t think it’s fair to say it was totally a marketing journal”, apparently on the grounds that it had excerpts from peer-reviewed papers. However, in his entire time on the board he never received a single paper for peer-review… . Such “throwaways” of non-peer reviewed publications and semi-marketing materials are commonplace in medicine. But wouldn’t that seem odd for an academic journal? Apparently not. Moreover, Peter Brooks had a pretty lax sense of academic ethics anyway: he admitted to having his name put on a “advertorial” for pharma within the last ten years, says The Scientist…

It is this attitude within companies like Merck and among doctors that allows scandals precisely like this to happen. While the scandals with Merck and Vioxx are particularly egregious, we know they are not isolated incidents…

In this case,
Key West

to

Washington.

She feels shaky.

Also, she’s still emotional from last night’s Sirens performance at George Washington University, which featured La Kid in

an amazing Batgirl costume which UD will show you as soon as La Kid WAKES UP and sends her a photo.

And UD ain’t getting any younger.

So she’s royally pissed that she’s got to do some focused, careful thinking this morning in putting together a post about the fake journal Merck published to pretend its new pills had objective research backing them up.

This post will also feature Doctor Marvin Konstam, pride of Tufts University…

UD feels as though a heavy fake medical journal with eerie ghostwriting in it is pressing on her heart and making it hard for her to breathe, let alone think…

But she’ll do her best. She thanks David, a reader, for alerting her to this story. After she walks her dog, she’ll do something with it.

… makes a sextuple play.

Dalton was arrested on suspicion of felony possession of a controlled substance, minor in possession of alcohol, possession of false identification and three traffic charges, including a lane violation and failure to provide insurance.

Extra point: Comment from one of the article’s readers:

I mean, come on guys, look at players at Ohio State, or Florida. Players on those teams get arrested/suspended often.

Yes. Why pick on him? He’s just a freshman. He’s just getting started.

Mrs. Cheever casually took care to point out that her husband [John Cheever] wrote only in the mornings because by the afternoon he was often drunk on gin.

“In those days, people did drink ever so much more than they do now,” Mrs. Cheever said with a chuckle. “It sounds shocking now, but it was not shocking then.”