Here's the 1936 Cinema Newsreel youtube.com/watch?v=iVy9Q6BV…

I'm a Board Certified anesthesiologist and have been in practice for 24 years. I just learned that the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia where I trained has launched a program to increase flu vaccine uptake among children by vaccinating them while under anesthesia. The program is called "Close your Eyes. We'll Immunize" This is stunningly irresponsible. Here's why: Anesthetists are extremely risk avoidant and endeavor to minimize patient exposure to anything which carries potential side effects. This is particularly true of pediatric patients who very often have never been exposed to anesthetic medications. We simply cannot know how an individual child will respond to these drugs for the first time. Every single medication we administer during an operation can potentially trigger untoward or allergic responses. When this occurs our primary responsibility is to stabilize the patient. Our secondary responsibility is to identify the offending agent. There is absolutely no justification of introducing another agent, in this case a flu vaccine, which carries a risk of harm and contributes nothing to the success of the operation. Some of the more common side effects of flu vaccines are fever (11-16%) and less commonly, a rash (1%). There is also an non-zero risk of severe allergic reactions and high-grade fevers which can develop over the course of minutes. What if a child under anesthesia receives a vaccine and develops a rash and/or fever? Is it from the antibiotic that the surgeon requested? Is it from the narcotic? The anxiolytic? The barbiturate? Anesthetic gases can also (rarely) trigger a life threatening response called Malignant Hyperthermia which commonly presents as a high fever. Without subsequent testing we cannot know which agent was responsible. Most commonly the testing is never done and the child’s record will forever reflect the possibility that some or all of the drugs which were used are responsible for their reaction. This makes future anesthetic care significantly more challenging and will require the use of alternatives which may not be necessary. Advocating for a flu vaccine while a child is anesthetized reflects the pervasive yet inaccurate attitude among the medical establishment that vaccines are perfectly safe. I simply cannot believe that my mentors would have ever supported this initiative when I was a resident there. Close your eyes indeed.

Powder River, Wyoming. Population barely a hundred. And standing over a dead log cabin steakhouse on the highway, this guy. Twenty one feet of rusting cowboy, giving you the thumbs up. Tumble Inn across his belly. LOUNGE CAFE on a big blue arrow. Sizzlin Steaks down at his boots. Every tube in him broken, the paint peeling, the neon long gone dark. I love him anyway. He was built in 1959 for a restaurant in Las Vegas that never installed him. Too big, the owner decided. A Wyoming oilman named Bill Grey found him, bought him, had the waving arm added and the Sizzlin Steaks base built, and hauled him out to Powder River around 1960. An old timer said that when they first lit him up he was the biggest, brightest thing in all of Wyoming. The steakhouse closed in 2005. He stood there alone for 18 more years, rusting in the wind off the high plains, outliving the business he was built to sell. I have photographed more than 30,000 neon signs in America, and most of that has meant driving. Backroads, old highways, the main streets of towns the interstate forgot. It is a race, honestly. The weather takes them, the bulldozers take them, the plastic sign companies take them, and there are thousands I will never get to in time. These signs are art. Hand bent glass and painted steel, built by local sign shops for local dreamers, and when one goes dark a whole town gets a little less itself. He got rescued. In 2023 they hauled him 35 miles to Casper, power washed decades of bird nests out of his belly, repainted him and rebent his neon. The crew named him Earl. He is being lit again this year at the Yellowstone Garage in Casper, close to home, still on the highway, still working. Anybody ever eat a sizzlin steak at the Tumble Inn? And has anybody seen Earl lit up in Casper yet? Enlarge this one big. Look at the rust. He earned every bit of it. Shooting neon signs is one hell of a rabbit hole to go down. It's more like a black hole really as you will never get them all no matter how hard you try. Here are just a few thousand of the neon signs that I've photographed in an album on Flickr: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…

IS THERE BIRTH CONTROL IN TAP WATER?

The legendary 1982 Cream Soda building in Harajuku, Tokyo, last night. Built and designed by Masayuki Yamasaki (1945-2013), the man who brought the Rockabilly subculture to Japan. Designed to look like a Miami Motel in a flamboyant art deco or tropical deco style. Originally meant to be a complete universe: the basement had a bar and a live music stage, the first two floors were shop space (sales were astronomical) and the top floor penthouse was Yamasaki's private apartment (still preserved today as it was the day he died) and the store staff formed and played in the band The Black Cats. Possibly one of the most famous buildings in Japan for people of his generation.