Mid-year catchup

Lunched today with two old friends from my army days -- Rod H. and Peter H. I hosted them at the Sunny Doll -- where we had Bento boxes, which were good, as usual.  I think we all ate up most of our rice.  I was pleased about that as a lot of people seem not to realize that the rice IS the meal from a Japanese viewpoint.  Meat etc. is a garnish.

The conversation ranged widely but because we are all old and falling apart medical matters figured largely.  I was pleased to see that Rod walked in without a walking stick. Some healing of some dodgy ligaments has taken place, it appears.

Peter gave us the story of his recent trip to a ham radio convention in America.  Most of the story was about the difficulties he had dealing with American airlines and how he overcame them.

I provided a huge dose of cynicism about  conventional medical wisdom -- talking about the poor evidence in favour of statins, PSA tests etc.  Peter and Rod both seemed pretty appalled when I told them about the replication crisis -- where most repeats of major papers in psychology and medicine were found not to give the same results.

We also mentioned briefly that most forbidden topic of race and IQ, with particular reference to the Queensland test -- something produced by people we know. It was a clever idea but didn't deliver the results hoped for.  As we are all old we are a bit out of tune with political correctness.  Things that were normal to us in our youth are now taken as deeply wicked. We tend not to agree.

There were only a few people in the restaurant when we arrived at 12 noon and none when we left at about 1:30.  They gave us some free samples of watermelon after a while so I took that as a signal that they wanted to shut up shop for the lunch period. Expecting lunchers after 1:30 would have been unrealistic