Dr. X's Free Associations

Vintage Photos: 1942

Photo by Jack Delano.  Left-click image to enlarge.

Pictured is 32-year-old Roy Nelin, a box packer in the roundhouse at the Proviso yard, C&NW Railroad, Melrose Park, Illinois.  Mr. Nelin was the son of Swedish immigrants and grew up on Chicago's Southside in the Englewood neighborhood.

Vintage Photos: 1940

Pie Town, New Mexico Fair (Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration)

A homesteader feeding his daughter.

Vintage Photos: 1943

Photo by Jack Delano (FSA-OWI).  Left-click photo to enlarge.

Mike Evans, a welder, at the rip tracks, Proviso yard of the Chicago & Northwestern RR in Chicago.

New Desktop Up & Running

The new Lenova is online.  Nothing fancy, but I like it.  Thanks to my shopper/installer. Though I'm not computer illiterate, my tech knowledge is, at best, average.  I like my system stripped of all the junk that rides along with Microsoft, Adobe, HP, iTunes, et al, so I let the expert handle it.

Future Posts

I've been busy and haven't had much time for posting lately, but I've had many thoughts about possible posts.  Here are a just a few I've been thinking about:

When a patient dies suddenly.  It happened recently.

Reactions to extreme acts of charity.

Thoughts about my recent visit to a police station.

Visiting cemeteries:  I visited one on the spur of the moment last week.  Robert Reed (The Brady Bunch) is buried there.  I wonder if anyone that knew him visits his grave.  But that isn't what I'll write about about if I do a cemetery post.

Facebook is an online version of a high school yearbook with new pages added.  People are often happy to reconnect, as long as they don't actually have to deal with each other in the real world. 

The Catholic Church scandals: I've been involved professionally for 17 years, but I don't think I'm going to go there.  Maybe a little a bit.  We'll see.

Vintage Photos: 1938

Newsstand, Memphis, Tennessee (Russell Lee, FSA).  Left-click images to enlarge.

One more below the fold.

Another Day, Another Chicago-style Beat Down.

Chicago cops have nasty habit of beating innocent people to a pulp.

The latest victims are a PhD management consultant and a University of Chicago grad student who had the audacity to stand up and put on his coat as he was leaving a restaurant.  The grad student inadvertently blocked the path of a plainclothes police officer who was also leaving the restaurant.  If you know Chicago cops, you know what comes next: a brutal beating in the parking lot; uniformed officers show up and do nothing and; one of the victims is threatened when he shows up at the police station to file a complaint.

Never file a complaint against Chicago PD without your attorney present.

More or less, it goes down like this every time.  It only makes the news when the cops overlook one of those pesky video cameras, as they did in this case (video).

Here's a small sampling of police criminality cases in Chicago.  The mayor has been serious about putting an end to this nonsense.  He even went outside the system, replacing the last police superintendent with Jody Weis, an FBI man.  Cops openly despise the new superintendent.  Of course, they can identify dozens of failures on the part of the superintendent, but the one matter they refuse to address is the anti-snitching mentality in their own ranks.  Police here complain that witnesses to crimes have an anti-snitching mentality, but the complaint rings hollow when cops won't snitch on criminal cops.

Social psychologists could probably say a great deal about the problem of police violence and corruption, but I don't know if anyone in policing pays attention to the research.  I know that cops have, by and large, ignored the compelling research on false confessions and faulty eyewitness testimony.  Are they ready to address police violence by listening to Philip Zimbardo?  I doubt it.

Change is difficult.

Slacking on Vintage Photo Posts for a Few Days

I may miss a few days of vintage photo posting.  I've been juggling machines and dealing with an ailing desktop that is about to be replaced.  My personal shopper selected a nice Lenovo.  A little stimulus for the Chinese, but the American distributor will make money too.

The Future of Bundled Digital Services

I don't know the details, but this looks interesting:

IMAGINE that for $33 a month you could buy Internet service twice as fast as what you get from Verizon or Comcast, bundled with digital high-definition television, unlimited long distance and international calling to 70 countries and wireless Internet connectivity for your laptop or smartphone throughout much of the country.

That’s what you can buy in France, and similar speeds and prices are available in other countries with competitive markets. But not in the United States. Prices here are three to five times that much for the fastest speeds — the highest prices among advanced economies.continued

It has become increasingly clear that the divisions between internet, telephone and television are obsolete. One of the problems that America has had as an early adopter is that we hang on to obsolete technologies. I don't see anything nefarious behind our foot-dragging.  Enormous investments were made in older technologies that are still making money, but I don't see how the old models can continue.

We watched a great indie flick last night using nothing but a $30 4G connection and there are already much faster 4G systems coming on line in Europe. How would you like 20mps to 80mps download speed from a little USB stick?

Not my hand or my stick, but this is what I'm using. It isn't nearly as fast as the new Scandinavian wireless, but it's fast and I am hooked.

Vintage Photos

Oklahoma Dugout,  Date Unknown.

Vintage Photos: 1949

Ringling Circus, Chicago (Charles Cushman).  Left-click photo to enlarge.