Yes, I know, it's been a long, long, time since a new blog entry darkened these pages. I'm going to take the easy way out and ascribe my lack of verbal productivity to the simple fact that there is just not enough time during the rotation cycle of this planet to get everything done.

For the last month (or more exactly, since I finished The Determinator) I've been hard at work on SWAMI. It's been a sort of three legged race, one step forward, two back; certainly an argument for ‘non-intelligent design.' As I start one section, my thoughts turn to some new function that would be cool to implement, which then sends me packing to the programmer textbooks and websites, which betray new capabilities, that then illustrate to me that my original design thoughts could have been better.

However, I must say that the software is very, very cool. We've been using beta-versions of it in the office and the patients have really liked it. Image all your specifics (Body Mass Index, Basal Metabolic Rate, Family History and Lab Values) and a whole slew of new criteria (biometrics) mixed into a bouillabaisse of information points and then set loose on huge tables of data. It is as if you bought a magic, Harry Potter version of Eat Right 4 Your Type where every page was written only for you --no doubt a dream come true for those thousands of readers who have told me over the years that they never read any parts of my books other than the section that pertains to their blood type.

I suspect that the software will be available to IfHI folks by year-end.

Interestingly, building the SWAMI engine has helped bring the material for The Genotype Diet into focus, since if you look at the SWAMI Engine as information going from intake screen to report, the Genotype Engine is just the information going the other way.

Heavy.

I continue to train vigorously. Right now I am working on a part of a very long hyung (form) that features the most vile, ego-dissolving series of moves. At the start of the sequence you raise your left arm into a high block while simultaneously lifting you hip and rotating it so that from the knee down the leg is parallel with the ground. You are actually doing this as a knee kick, so it must be done fast, which certainly does nothing for your balance.

But wait, it gets better. So now as your arm moves from above your head to being outstretched and your hip is rotated with your lower leg sideways at about hip level, you spin on the rapidly wearying right standing leg 180 degrees, and jump into the air as you execute a outside-inside crescent kick to the now-outstretched left hand.

Then you do the whole thing from the other side.

Perhaps the coolest thing about working on these moves is that I developed an appreciation of how ice skaters use moving their center of balance inward as a way to initiate and maintain a spin.

They say that Hwang Kee, the founder of this discipline, used to amuse his friends by jumping over the dinner table from a standing position. From photos it seems Master Hwang was about 5 feet tall and probably 98 pounds soaking wet. A 6 foot, three inch Spanish-Italian Meso-Ectomorph would probably be far less amusing at this; especially if you were hungry.

Took the family to Brooklyn last weekend. It's about a two hour ride from Connecticut, and the last hour is on the rapidly dissolving New York City infrastructure, which, if you spend any time away from it, leaves you completely unprepared for just who narrow and crumbly the NYC roads are.

I had a thoughtful time, visiting areas of my youth, though I doubt my kids cared much about whether this or that stretch of woods was where I used to catch butterflies, or which catering hall used to be a police station. They did appreciate a trip to perhaps the best designer outlet store in the city, Century 21 Stores.

Then we schlepped to Rudy Guiliani's favorite restaurant, Gargiulos in Coney Island, where I overdosed on the garlic and broccoli rabe. I did not jump over the table, which considering the clientèle, was probably good for my health on a lot of different levels.

Anyway, gotta go. But before I do, let me wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving, with all the enjoyment that comes from taking a minute to contemplate what great gifts life, health, and family afford us.

I promise to write more regularly. Really.

"Islands -- I don't get them.
Surrounded by water, poor things."

Patrizia, in Antonioni's L'Adventura

Have been dutifully working through the manuscript worksheet for 'Fatigue' this morning.

Funny how one's perception about something changes with proximity. This subject for the ies was not developed by either Catherine Whitney or me, but rather by our editor, and I was always a bit leery about the concept, since it is not a proper disease per se, but rather a common component of a tremendous number of other, more specific, diseases.

Yet now that I work on it, I am beginning to believe that there is an important contribution here.

One thing I had forgotten about was the large body of work that I had done on the subject back in the late 1980's, most of which has never seen the printed page. Things like second-messenger (cAMP) enhancement, Schwartzman's endotoxin phenomenon,and the cortisol- 11 beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase axis.

Now I just have to decipher all the cryptic doodlings in my notebooks, which could be a problem since I am one of those people who cannot read their own handwriting.

The quote above is from the delightful Waterfront by Phillip Lopate. The book is literary tour around Manhattan island, from the perspective of a social historian. I am a sucker for architectural history, especially of my beloved borough of Brooklyn ('Fourth Largest City in America'). About a year ago, I embarked on a project to determine the exact whereabouts of original Dutch settlement of New Utrecht, a neighborhood of Brooklyn close to where I grew up, and probably most famous for supplying the high school shots at the opening of 'Welcome Back Kotter.'

From old landholding maps I found on the internet, I could superimpose the old street drawings of New Utrecht as layers in Photoshop over the Mapquest diagrams of the modern area. To my surprise, the town center of New Utrecht lay within the parking lot of a ramshackle discount store where as a child I would get my school supplies, and whose owner in 1969 once tried to convince several very sceptical kids that a chunk of sidewalk in the display case under the checkout counter was actually a moon rock from Apollo 11.

To understand the apparent lack of purpose for that interaction, you must read some of Arthur Miller's remembrances of his childhood in Brooklyn .

I believe our 'Blood Relations' columnist Cocky Van Hesteren hails from 'Old Utrecht' --the real one in the Netherlands.

My brother recently gave me An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn by Francis Morrone and James Iska which is a tad on the boring side. However I am sure it will serve much better purposes with the buildings directly in front of me.

If you are interested in NYC architectural history, you'd probably enjoy surfing Kevin Walsh's Forgotten NY website.