The poor prune. Delicious and rich looking as it may be, it is saddled with epithets like “prune-face”, a “wrinkled grape”, and a prune every morning keeps you “regular”. For a fruit whose taste is enjoyed by so many, the euphemisms seem dishearteningly displaced and not the least metaphoric. I mean, isn’t the image of the aging face wrinkled and collapsed? Don’t we think of the elderly as sweet and interesting but not to be overindulged? Of course neither you (the reader) nor I know what it is like to be “old”, but like a red face in an embarrassing moment, we know it when we see it. And none of us want to be there.
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My wife won’t let me have lunch with Liv Ullman. At least she won’t facilitate my having lunch with Liv Ullman. My wife is Swedish. Liv Ullman is Norwegian (almost the same). We will be visiting Swedish friends outside of Nice next summer. Liv Ullman lives outside of Nice. I have asked my wife to call her best friend to find someone who knows Liv Ullman and to invite her to have lunch with me. My wife laughs. Maybe she is jealous! I really don’t know. But Liv Ullman is 70 and I am 65, and sometime in the future we will be dead and I won’t be able to have lunch with Liv Ullman so I need to do this now.
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On or about August 27, 2002 I awoke in the morning and went to work as usual. I did not know that my world as I knew it was about to change irrevocably. On a subliminal basis I knew that I had cancer of the soul. My marriage was in name only, my family dissipated, my work was my passion. I did not understand that in a few hours, a Kafkaesque moment, I would turn yellow and the cancer in my soul would become the cancer in my pancreas. That was then — now I am a 7 year survivor of a cancer that few get to tell about.
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I am not sure how many of the public noticed a provision in the proposed health reform legislation that would have placed a federal tax on cosmetic procedures. The provision was known as the Bo-TAX and it aroused a unified response from the medical community in general and organized medicine in particular. This proposed tax was a clear example of how out of touch the Congress is with the needs of the public. This always happens in government when those who govern make a career of governing rather than serving the electorate.
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…it was with some regret that I watched NBC News last week promote a new breakthrough in fat destruction that would revolutionize body contouring. The breakthrough is a machine that freezes fat causing the fat to self destruct. The expert was one of my most esteemed colleagues who described (promoted) this technology even though it has not passed through any testing by the FDA (or any other scientific body to my knowledge).
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