My PCP (Primary Care Physician) and Buckminster Fuller

I have good one. He is an Internist here and professor at UC Davis. I went to see him this morning to have my prescription for insanity, I mean rosacea, renewed. He chewed me out because he hasn’t seen me since January 2017. I was thinking; ‘What, are we dating?’ Early on he asked me; “How is your memory?” “Good!” Then later he asked me the same question again. I said; “Are you testing my memory? You already asked me that.”

Dr. Xin-Nong Li, FACP
Dear Physician

Anyway, blood pressure was good also (mine, not sure about his) and, heading for poker from his office, I recalled some early times when I gave blood in Denver for around $5 a pop. I was a lowly three-stripe airman going to AF Intelligence school (Leave that one alone okay Aught?) and was broke all the time. I was pretty exhausted too from a lot of late nights studying...Bar napkins mainly.

On my last donation there, the attending technician took my blood pressure and said it was too low. She told me to “walk around the block” and she would try again. So I did, and she did, and it was..."still too low."  She told me to "get some rest" and sent me packin'.

And then...and then...and then I stopped at a light and our new(er) ride shut down as my foot was on the brake. The automatic shut down feature is an interesting new technology designed to save fuel is what it is. It starts up again when you take your foot off the brake and move it to the accelerator. That event brought me out of my "PCP" reverie and my feeble brain slipped into another one.  

I thought of a quote I think from Buckminster Fuller that went something like this. "Imagine, the amount energy consumed by all vehicles in the world that are stopped at lights at any moment."  Food for thought eh?!  Imagine if all the vehicles on earth had this shut down feature - the reductions in energy consumption and air pollution alone!  I know, I know...take it a step further and imagine if all vehicles were electric.

R Buckminster Fuller
American architect, systems theorist,
author, designer, inventor and futurist

Note:  I Googled the real quote and I made a mistake.  But Fuller liked mistakes, a lot.  So here it is: 

"There are over 2 million cars standing in front of red lights with their engines going.  Then we have over 2 million times approximately 100 horsepower being generated as they are idling there, so that we have something like 200 million horses jumping up and down and going nowhere.  Now, we have to count that when we begin to get down to what is the efficiency of the economy."

...and he died in 1983 so you gotta' figure there are millions more out there with a hell of a lot more horsepower idling right now right?!