Los Angeles Advertising for State-Legal Marijuana

As California moves out of the "medical marijuana" era and into the broader "state-legal marijuana" era, we are seeing a proliferation of billboards.  I saw some yesterday on Sunset Boulevard near my house and another driving down Century Boulevard into LAX.

Call me dumb, but I didn't get this at first.  It means: Don't call this person a stoner!  Call her a nurse.

See the tags directing you to ForgetStoner.com and MedMen.

ForgetStoner is a red page website with a dozen pictures of persons of all genders and ages and occupations who use state-legal marijuana.  (Click each pic to see the person's name and job).

The webpage also leads forward to MedMen, a multi-city business for state-legal marijuana.

The first two webpages for MedMen are below:

MedMen Landing Page

MedMen Page 2

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On May 24, 2018, the SoCal biotech association holds a mixer for stakeholders interested in medical marijuana and with a discussion of pending FDA-approval epilepsy drug based on cannabidiol.   Here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/socalbio-networking-forum-medicinal-cannabis-recent-developments-and-future-prospects-tickets-43669594934?ref=enivtefor001&invite=MTQzNDU0MTUvYnJ1Y2VAYnJ1Y2VxdWlubi5jb20vMA%3D%3D&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_term=eventpage

The "Tenderloin Museum" in San Francisco

San Francisco has a "Tenderloin Museum" (Tues-Sun 10-5) and most days offers a one-hour walking tour at 2 pm.  (Register for both for $15.)

Website here.    See my earlier blog on St. Boniface, near my SF office, here.

The museum is nice, covering the older history 1900-1960 but also featuring many stories from the several decades when the Tenderloin Times newspaper was published.   The tour covers much of the district, including visiting an active SRO hotel and a dive bar.  (For more on that theme, see the 2000 documentary about the Sunshine SRO hotel in NYC on the Bowery; here.) 
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There's a new Sudanese restaurant Casbah at 295 Eddy. See also several interesting Thai restaurants on Larkin in the block or two south of O'Farrell.

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William Saroyan lived in the Tenderloin and his play The Time of Your Life is set in one of its dive bars.

How to Watch European DVD's for $20

Update.  After writing this, I discovered that on my Windows laptop and with my portable drive, a Region 2 DVD I got from Amazon.co.uk played fine without doing anything at all.   This way: as a personal use only MP4 file it played with standard Windows players and also dragged and played fine on an iPhone.   (I don't have software to play the actual DVD live on the laptop, although that's easily available, so I don't know if it would cross the Region 2 issue or not.)

I don't know if this is so easy with all combinations of devices, so if you need to actually reset Windows to play a particular DVD on a particular DVD reader, see below.

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There are just a couple movies I've always wanted to see but they are only available on European (Region 2) DVDs, which won't play on standard USA DVD players.

The DVD's themselves are easily available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de, etc.

The simplest answer is this.  Buy a budget $20 slim USB DVD player and plug it into your laptop.  Some DVD players nowadays run standalone off a laptop USB port and don't require AC.*

• Go to THIS PC or MY COMPUTER, depending on your version of Windows.
• Right click on the DVD drive and click PROPERTIES.
• Click on the tab HARDWARE
• Click on the button PROPERTIES.
• Click on the tab DVD REGION.
• Selection the country you want (e.g. United Kingdom)
• Click to set the DVD player.

If that's not clear enough, click to enlarge:

click to enlarge, read top L, top R, lower L, lower R

Details

Set and Reset Your One DVD Player, Not a Second One

You can set and reset the DVD region on a device (here, the DVD player on the USB, not the PC) up to 5 times.   So if you really just wanted to watch one UK DVD Region 2, you could reset to Region 2, watch it, and set back to Region 1.  

Region O Players?

Supposedly you can buy Region 0 (universal) standalone DVD players (like for HDMI into a TV) on Amazon.  I looked at this and they seemed quirky or held variable user ratings.  

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There are softwares to look at hard drive files for personal use, e.g. WinX DVD Ripper Platinum or others, but I don't recommend or not recommend this.

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* I even have a flatbed scanner that runs great off one laptop USB port alone.

From Irv Yalom (2017) to John Whitehorn (1944): A thoughtful quote

When I was in college and medical school at Stanford in the 1970s/1980s, one of the most prominent faculty psychiatrists was Irv Yalom, a world expert in group psychotherapy.   Later in life, he wrote a number of novels and a number of books of "short stories" describing numerous interesting patients he had treated (with their permission and with anonymized details).

I've read a couple of his patient stories books (often as audio books) and this spring I read his autobiography, BECOMING MYSELF, A Psychiatrist's Memoir (here).

In his autobiography, Yalom describes monkeys escaping from the labs of Dr. Karl Pribram in the 1960s, when the labs were adjacent to the psychiatry clinics in Stanford's then-new Palo Alto hospital.  I was a lab assistant for Dr. Pribram around 1980 as a college student and KP was quite influential on me.  One of Yalom's mentors at Hopkins, Dr. David Hamburg, recruited both Yalom and my PhD advisor, Dr. Jack Barchas, to Stanford.   (Barchas went on to chair psychiatry at Cornell for some 20 years.)

But here is where I am going:

Yalom describes his lifelong respect for his Hopkins residency mentor Dr. John Whitehorn, a well respected clinician.  Whitehorn wrote a seminal article on psychiatric interviewing in 1944.   (Here).  There is a wonderful quote in Whitehorn's article (p 211):

"Limping may be caused, so to speak, by the deficiency of certain muscles, the innervation of which has been destroyed.  But it is not the injured muscle which limps - it is the man, managing to somehow keep going despite the defect."

I loved that.   In context he continues, "Study should be aimed at finding, and therapy at helping, him use whatever means may aid the man to do better."

 

Lenovo USB 3 Docking Station Disturbed by Webinar Software

Update.  

As shown below, my two year old Lenovo 3.0 Docking Station starting generating device errors every 45 seconds.   After a couple hours of troubleshooting, deleting all "webinar" apps (like GoToMeeting) seemed to fix it.   Right.  For about 24 hours.  Then it was as bad as before.  Go figure.

I ended up going to Staples and getting a USB-to-VGA box (J5Create JUA311).   So for the time being, I'm ignoring the Lenovo dock, and running my home office off the labtop, a simple 4-socket USB hub, and two monitors with (A) the MiniDVI driver driving a DVI monitor and (B) the JUA311 driving a VGA monitor.    

I got a new Lenovo USB 3.0 Docking Station and it works fine, so the old one really had some kind of electromechanical failure after two years.   Interesting that my software deletion seemed to fix it for 24 hours.  Mystery.

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[Adding to a long information center chain about Lenovo Docking Station malfunctions, characterized by a "Device not recognized" flag every 45 seconds].

My problem was fixed by some combination of uninstalling Adobe and also uninstalling several Webinar apps.

In April 2018, I had the same problem, every 45 seconds monitors would blink off and a window would pop up "USB device recently plugged in not recognized."  I did various routine troubleshooting, reinstalling Lenovo 3.0 Dock drivers, running a Displaylink failure detection app, running various device driver update apps like Lenovo and Windows Updaters.   None of this worked.  Changing physical ports did not help.  

FIX.  After this hour or two,  I went to Control Panel and uninstalled several programs in one sitting (Adobe PDF software [I used a simpler PDF reader], and several Webinar apps like Zoom and Gotomeeting).   So I don't know which one was the problem.  However, at least for a half hour, this has now CURED a problem that had been occuring every few seconds.   

PS.  As a sidenote, before the severe USB not recognized failures struck yesterday, for a couple days I had a rare prodromal problem I've seen a few times in 5 years, where MS Word would vibrate and act weird in one monitor but not the other.   After a couple days of that "minor" glitch, things went kaput as described above.