WITH A BOULDER ON MY SHOULDER, FEELIN' KINDA OLDER: Dr. Struhl, the surgeon who did Donna's shoulder replacements (all three of them), finally got back to us. His verdict: after multiple X-rays, arthroscopies and other images, there's no evidence that her right shoulder has a torn rotator cuff. (As both Carl Sagan and Donald Rumsfeld observed, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but in this instance, it can fairly be said that that's the way to bet.) What there is undeniably is dislocation, going back at least a year. (The doctor is still trying to see what older X-rays languishing in his files might show just how long ago the dislocation first occurred.)

     What this means is that the pain and restricted motion Donna has had in that shoulder are not going to be resolved easily. If the shoulder has been dislocated this long, it can be relocated (un-dislocated?), but it's liable to dislocate again spontaneously in a matter of days or weeks. Replacing the shoulder yet again will be both difficult (because of all the scar tissue that has built up in the three previous surgeries at the site) and risky (given Donna's historical propensity for developing infections in prosthetic joints). Dr. Struhl is still researching and thinking about what might or might not be done here.

     Ethan has now set up housekeeping in Batié, Cameroon, and was starting to teach his first for-real classes this week. (The first household furnishings he had to purchase included a large bucket, so he could bathe; a blanket, so he could sleep; and a portable stove, which uses bottled gas, so he could cook. After that he went and got a chair.) We all wish him luck.

Comments on APA-NYU, Volume 8, #8 (e-APA-NYU #76)

JUST FOR A CHANGE OF PACE (Deb Wunder):

Yes, as you get older, people start dying [relatively] younger and younger. /*/ Congratulations on your success-in-progress as a Weight Watcher, and long may it continue. /*/ (¢Cinii) I too find (long-distance) rail travel massively preferable to bus travel. I may be projecting, but I suspect that most people would prefer it too, if trains were equally cheap and offered the same range of places served. Unfortunately, owing to the massive infrastructure investment needed to start a railroad as opposed to a bus company, the competitive environment needed to drive service up and prices down isn't likely to develop in our lifetimes. More's the pity. /*/ (¢me) Well, I wasn't given the software, just the "help" manual to edit, and the manual doesn't give many details about the internals of the algorithm—the program author wants to keep that a trade secret. So it wouldn't help Abby much even if she could make head or tail of the manual (not an easy task, even after the work I did on it).

SERCON FOR APA NYU (Fred Phillips):

I fear you need to add a glossary to your contributions; I had to research "Kalem" online to find out it was a literary circle to which Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long belonged. (It was also the name of a small New York–based film studio in the 19-teens. Apparently each organization took its names from the initials of its respective founders—K, L, and M.) But is it proper to call individual members "Kalems"? /*/ I had rather less luck with "KOMMATI," which brought forth mostly a batch of references to a Greek pop song. /*/ It's interesting to read the list of books you've acquired, but I find it more interesting when you include more than just the titles, and discuss the books and your experiences with them, as you do, for example, with the Collins Etymological And Reference Dictionary and People of the Book. It's especially useful when your blurb answers the questions: Once you'd read the whole book, did you still feel that it was worth it? And would it be enjoyable (or even comprehensible) to someone not already as immersed in its subject as you?

OZ REPORT FOR APA NYU (Dorothea Phillips):

Welcome to the apa, fair lady! Lovely report. I've never been Down Under and am unlikely to get there any time soon, but who knows what the future may bring?

ICONOCLAST (Joel Nelson):

Congratulations to your son on his marriage, and to you on your fatherhood-in-law. /*/ I think I need a scorecard to keep track of all the churches and pastors you refer to in the "Tale of Two Pastors". "I wound up goodmouthing [the pastor] to those I badmouthed him to just four months previously." Does this mean you were a bit too ready to badmouth him in the first place? Should you be heading into all those churches with (metaphorical) guns drawn? I'm finding it a disquieting metaphor. /*/ I spent some time working through your Yahtzee logic, copying and pasting some of it into Excel myself, and I think I finally comprehend it (or did for a few minutes, anyway). But the Yahtzee scoring I'm familiar with doesn't reward two pairs or a single pair.

THE BIG AWAKENING (Art Tobias):

I had to do a Web search to find out that Horselover Fat is an alter ego of Philip K. Dick's in VALIS (the name is a liberal translation of the Greek "Philip" and the German "Dick"). Perhaps I'll read that (as well as The Big Sleep) one of these days...

TEST (Fredrik Coulter):

Okay, you've tossed your hat in the ring. Care to tell us anything about what you've been doing for the past couple of decades?

LIFE* WITHOUT THE AUGUST COLLATION (Ariel Cinii):

"I'd often wondered what would ultimately force me out of my home of 18.5 years. This [the digital TV morass and your resultant inability to receive 'free' TV] might just be it." And where are you figuring to move? Is Montréal surfacing in your daydreams again? /*/ I need to get my CDs organized too. I also need to get my MP3s organized; some are on my laptop, some on the old Windows 98 desktop downstairs, some on the mass-storage box that Ethan installed a few months before he departed for Cameroon, and some on a pile of CD-Rs I've burned over the years. I'm just about ready to start contemplating the thought of packing away the vast majority of my vinyl discs (of which I've played maybe half a dozen in the past half dozen years) and reel-to-reel tapes (which have seen similar usage patterns) and seeing if the already packed basement can spare some room for them. /*/ I sort of fell into reading the first Sookie Stackhouse book a few years ago, and not long thereafter I sort of fell into watching True Blood on HBO; not wanting to occupy too much grey matter distinguishing among conflicting sets of rules of how vampires work, I've deliberately avoided reading or seeing any of the Twilight series. But that's a fun filk anyway.

JAMISON, TAKE E-LETTER (Mark L. Blackman):

Once again, the Cyclones won their division title (16 games ahead of the Staten Island Yankees!) even after blowing the game we attended. Unfortunately, I doubt that any kind of winning record will be enough to get Brooklyn a team in a higher-ranked league. As you say, the hometown of the Dodgers deserves better. /*/ After the on-field hijinks associated with the Salute to Sandlot Baseball and "Baby's First Ballgame," I was worried about what they'd do for Prostate Cancer Awareness. Fortunately, they did not hold on-field examinations. /*/ Sorry I omitted one of your Cyclones pictures when formatting the hard-copy edition. /*/ (¢APA-NEWS) "Calling the V the 6th Avenue Local and the W the Broadway Local, of course, omits their Queens routes." The D and B are commonly called 6th Avenue expresses, and the Q and N Broadway expresses, ignoring their Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx route segments. MTA Manhattanopia as usual—but how crowded would the subway signs and map be if they wrote things like "Grand Concourse/6th Avenue/West End Express" for each route? /*/ (¢self) The World Trade Center was the architecture everyone loved to hate, right up until 11 September 2001. I always said that the Twin Towers weren't the skyscrapers, but the discarded boxes they'd been packed in. /*/ (¢me) "Hmm, do people who text in cars (driving or riding) get sick?" The ones who do it while driving tend to get dead, possibly raising the average intelligence of the human race marginally. /*/ *neep-neep alert* "lossy" is the antonym (in geek jargon) of "lossless"—a lossless process or format loses nothing. A ZIP file, for example, is compressed, but can be decompressed, restoring an exact copy of the original with nothing missing; so ZIP is a lossless format. JPGs, by contrast, lose some of the picture quality of the original BMP image file; enough manipulations of the wrong kinds produce graininess or distortion. Hence JPG is a lossy format. *end neep-neep alert* /*/ "Of course, they [amNY] also say that the Q train is an express." Well, it is, in Manhattan. It's that pesky multiplexity of routes again.