Quick Roundup 313

A (Belated) Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Not being Irish and being long-removed from a childhood that usually included an Irishman as a parish priest, I'd usually forget about St. Patrick's Day. That was the case throughout my adulthood up until about eight years ago when I started seeing Mrs. Van Horn, who is third-generation Irish.

I let her take care of remembering St. Patrick's Day each year, but she was out of town today*. I probably would have forgotten, but someone mentioned the occasion on the radio as my clock alarm went off.

Since she has been out of town for a few weeks, this made me miss her enough to actually wear green today -- a pinstriped shirt.

No trip to the pub for me, though! Lots of work in the evening. When I got home, I poured a nice, refreshing Session over a drop of green food coloring, fired up the computer, and got to work.

I look forward to picking my wife up at the airport tomorrow evening!

Whether

In addition to yesterday being St. Patrick's Day, it was the "whether" portion of the long, drawn-out, and semi-random match process, whereby my wife finds out where she will do her medical residency.

I am told that the process resembles fraternity pledge week in that each interviewee and each institution compiles a ranked list. A process of list comparisons determines the match for each new medical school graduate.

We have computers now, and yet it still takes a month from list submittal to match day. I strongly suspect that the "human element" (read: procrastination by medical faculty) has a lot to do with it.

One wrinkle of the process is that it is possible for a recent graduate not to match at all! In such an event, it is common to "scramble" (i.e., frantically track down schools with empty residency slots and try to get into those).

In order to accommodate this possibility, students are informed whether they matched a few days before they learn -- if they matched -- where. (This way, if they don't match, they can still scramble before "Match Day" and celebrate with everyone else. I think. I am a little fuzzy on that part.)

Mrs Van Horn did, in fact, match, which is a relief. We now know have where we will live in a few months narrowed down to one of the below states -- assuming I haven't forgotten any of the places she interviewed!


Every possibility has significant upsides and downsides to me, even including a few more years in H-Town, which had been my top choice when we started talking about where she ought to try matching last year.

Wish us luck!

Some Good Tunes

Some time ago, good friend and fellow ska aficionado Adrian Hester sent a compilation CD of a third-wave act from Europe I somehow had never managed to hear about, Mr. Review.

Last week, I finally got around to opening it up and taking a listen, and I've been enjoying it during my commutes this week. Below is a live version of one of the songs, hosted on Youtube. The CD is called One Way Ticket to Skaville: The Essential Mr. Review, and the band was from the Netherlands. (Warning: The lead singer shouts an expletive right off the bat.)

And no, I don't know why the lead singer of a Dutch band playing in a West Indian idiom is wearing a kilt. He's pictured on the back of the album in a blazer and tie, with the kilt.

-- CAV

* "Today", meaning "yesterday". I wrote part of this post then, knowing I'd be busy during my normal blogging time. This means, of course, that I'll actually get to see my lovely wife "tomorrow", meaning "today", in its usual sense. Or something like that.

Updates

Today: Added a note.