As noted in last week’s post announcing the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall, I spent last week on vacation with my family. We were in and around Boston for the better part of 6 days. Boston would be one of my favorite cities in the United States were it not for their arrogant, haughty sports fans (“And over here we have one of our 452 championship trophies. Oh wait, I forgot, it’s 453. One of our teams won again last night.”).

But seriously, Boston is a great city – immensely walkable, appropriately historic, and quite clean (at least in and around downtown where we spent most of our time). I’ve been there many times over the years for personal and work purposes, but this was my first extended time as a tourist.

As I’ve written about in previous years, one of my favorite things to do when I am on vacation is to spend time in that city’s main public library branch (you don’t have to scream, “NERD!!” I get it). Like some of you, I grew up in an era where libraries meant one and only one thing – books. Maybe there were a few tables and chairs strewn about, but libraries of the 1980s generally weren’t considered places to linger around in comfort. It would probably take you 20 minutes to find the book you wanted after digging through the card catalog and book stacks (and don’t get me started if you needed to dig through microfiche for research purposes), but once you got your books, you would check them out and bring them home. Maybe there were one or two beanbag chairs, but that was about the extent of it.

And so frankly, it amazes me every time I visit a big city library to see how they have reimagined their spaces in recent decades. In Boston, I walked into the entrance and just about bumped into Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was being interviewed live in the NPR studio tucked into one of the corners of the library. Further on, there was a 6-piece band playing in the courtyard entertaining those who were eating lunch. Then there was the dainty restaurant that served a massive afternoon tea each day ($65 a person for lots of fancy finger foods, tea sandwiches, and the like – I didn’t partake). Upstairs was the “special collection” area where you could have actual librarians in white gloves (OK, they were cheap, latex blue gloves) very excitedly showing off the various documents they had curated for the month’s theme of “Magic in the Early 1900s.” My son quite enjoyed the “teen center” where they had video games galore you could play for as long as you wanted.

Now don’t get me wrong – I loved the boring old libraries as a kid too. Not all of us are as bourgeoisie as Derek and can afford to shell out $35 in a bookstore every time we want to read something new. The fact that I can simply walk into my library, grab any stack of books I want, and not even have to worry about overdue fines anymore still amazes me.

But to see how libraries have evolved into spaces that truly serve their community got me thinking — why aren’t we doing more of this in medical education? Why aren’t we reimagining how we use our educational spaces to better serve our audience of learners? While there is nothing wrong with the “tried and true” dais of speakers and slide decks, are there innovations we can all consistently build into the live education model to transform them into more efficient learning spaces? I’m not talking about throwing away the core tenets of what we do, but how do we build upon our past to create a more engaging future?

We talk about these sorts of things often during CMEpalooza, and we try to inject new ideas of our own into many of our sessions, but there are probably things we could do better as well. Creativity isn’t always easy when you’ve been doing something well for many years (and yes, I know we may also need to convince funders to, you know, put dollars behind some of our wackier ideas). But I figure that if something as staid as the public library can break from its traditional model, so can we.

We’re now well into the Dog Days of Summer. Pretty much wherever you are reading this, it’s hot (unless you are reading this in Antarctica, which would be pretty fricking cool).

Turns out that the origins of the phrase “Dog Days of Summer” have nothing to do with baseball, summer carnivals, or beach vacations. It dates way, way back to a time before Derek was even born – the ancient Romans dubbed the 20 days before Sirius (the brightest star in Canus Major, or the “Greater Dog”) rose with the sun and the 20 days after it rose with the sun as the “Dog Days.” Seems that they believed the fact that Sirius was brightest in the sky on or around July 20 meant that it gave off heat that added to the sun’s warmth, thereby causing the hottest days of the year on the ground. And here you thought only Derek would give you useless information for your next cocktail party (note from Derek: I can contribute, too! The Harry Potter character Sirius Black was named after this same “Dog Star,” which means his name roughly translates to Black Dog. Sirius Black’s animagus form was, of course, a big black dog. Scott died from boredom while reading this.)

But you know where you won’t find any useless information, but rather extremely useful information? No, no, not on “X” (so weird to write that). We’re talking about CMEpalooza Fall.

I know, I know. Every since we teased the release of our Fall agenda in mid-July, you’ve been frantically refreshing your browser every 10 minutes to see if it’s on our website. You’ve probably let out a few “C’mon guys, is this really that hard?” expletives. I’d tell you to blame Derek and that my sessions have pretty much been locked down for weeks, but that wouldn’t be nice of me to point fingers at anyone else. So let’s just say that we’re both to blame (Note from Derek: Yes, let’s go with that.)

The blame game ends now (well, sort of) as we’re proud to unveil — FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER!! – the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall. If you’ve been following our saga for these last 10 years, you probably won’t be surprised that there are still a few “TBAs” with some of our sessions that will be filled in eventually, but there is still a lot of meat for you to gnaw on right now. We’re bringing back some old ideas and introducing some new ones. There will be some faces you’ve seen in CMEpaloozas past and some that will be new to us all. Which is the way we like it.

So check out the agenda, clear your calendar on Wednesday, October 18 (it sounds really far away, I know), and stop poking those needles into your Derek voodoo doll.

Whenever you have an event as large and prestigious as CMEpalooza, you expect that the masses will come calling when you are celebrating a milestone, as we are right now in the midst of 10 years of our biannual event.

And yet shockingly, The View never contacted us. Silence from the major news network. Heck, we would have settled for a guest spot on Inside the NBA’s pregame show (Derek has always wanted to yell at Charles Barkley for saving his best season once he left Philly) (note from Derek: true.).

Perhaps all of these outlets weren’t properly programmed into my phone, so when they came up as “Potential Spam” or “Unknown Caller” (which always triggers an “Ignore” response), they moved onto the next guest instead of leaving a voicemail.

I even bought a ticket to sit in the audience on Saturday night to watch Bill Maher at one of our local venues. I made sure to remind his booking agent via Twitter several times that I would be in attendance and available to come onstage to talk with Bill about the ways that CMEpalooza has impacted our big, bad, funny world. And yet, the show came and went with nary a wave. Perhaps they just couldn’t see me way up in the bowels of the venue? Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

Frankly, it was all a bit demoralizing. How will America survive without hearing more insight from Derek and I about the many valuable lessons we have learned over this last decade? Surely, a generation of our youth–struggling for sense and purpose in this big, bad, funny world–will be motivated by the story of CMEpalooza’s humble beginnings. But without an outlet beyond our own walls, how would we get this message to them?

Thankfully, our old friends at the Leading Learning podcast series came to the rescue. When they reached out a few months ago asking if Derek and I would do a reprise of the most popular podcast in their history that we recorded back in 2017 (we’re assuming – we didn’t actually ask), we didn’t hesitate to say yes. After several months of editing–you’d be surprised how much Derek can talk once he gets on a roll–we’re proud to announce that this latest podcast is now available. You can access it wherever you listen to your podcasts (but preferably not in the shower–that would be really weird).

If you don’t have the time to listen, or you simply cannot stand our voices, there is even a handy transcript available. I would tell you here about some of the topics we cover, but then you wouldn’t be quite as likely to listen to the podcast, would you? I can tell you that we did not discuss the following topics that are nonetheless near and dear to our hearts:

1. Delis
2. Richard Pryor’s best movies
3. The differences between the Amish and Mennonites (note from Derek: I’m an expert.)
4. Best arcade games in 1980s pizza shops
5. The NBA playoffs (yes, we’re still angry)

Thanks again to the big brains at Leading Learning for making us sound somewhat coherent. I know that ain’t easy.