This piece of writing was composed on Sunday, May 21st, co-written with my good friend, the inimitable Julie. Her text appears in one font and my text appears in another, and if you want to make this really exciting, try to figure out which is who.

I'm not afraid to die, and in fact, in some ways, I'm looking forward to it. Forsteri doesn't preach anything one way or another about the afterlife, to any great degree, but I've always assumed I'm looking at either Heaven or insensate oblivion, and either way, it's almost certainly an improvement over mortality. That's not to say I want to die -- I've got another eighty years (at the least) worth of plans and schemes and I'd be very disapointed not to be able to see them come to fruition, so I currently plan to make every effort to stay alive (and keep enjoying myself at least as much as I have been up until now) for that long -- but the prospect of one day Stopping doesn't fill me any great anxiety. What does cause me a little anxiety is the prospect of all the unfortunate feelings that my death would miraculously and illogically cause in a respectably large number of people. Hypothetical situation time: supposing that tommorow, I die -- not that I've got it penciled into my schedule or anything, but hypothetically. To the people left behind will no doubt fall all sorts of annoying logistics, such as planning a funeral and calling the caterer. So, the question is: if I discorporated tommorow, how silly would I feel knowing I'm going to get a Jewish funeral?

For the benefit of people who've never seen one before, here's your quick picture of what my funeral would probably look like. Paperman's funeral chapel would be decently filled but probably not overflowing. A small number of prayers would be said. A rabbi whose name I don't know would say a few words about how I was such as meshuggener mensch. On the whole, the religiosity of it would be tastefully understated, although every male and a fair number of females in attendence would be wearing kippot. It would be a sobre, simple, pious ceremony, the incredible irony of which would be apparent only to a relatively small number of people.

Were I designing the ceremony for myself, it would have a 3.14159 mile processional march, a forty-two flag-gun salute, an honour guard of twelve power-armoured Space Marines, and selected readings from the Book of Goldman. The word "yisgadal" would probably not come up. It would not be particularly Jewish. Or cost-effective.

This does make a perfect amount of sense, of course. I've always felt that the purpose of a funeral is to please the mourners and not, for obvious reasons, the departed. I'd feel pretty silly looking down and watching people reciting the shmoneh esreh at my funeral, based solely on how much I dislike that (and most other) Hebrew prayers, but as long as I don't have to take part myself, I don't mind it so much. The funeral isn't to make me feel any better, since I'll either be in paradise or oblivious, and most of the people I leave behind will be Jews, especially if you exclude my friends who live more than a thousand miles away from me and so probably wouldn't come in for the show. I'd almost certainly not want a respectable or religious ceremony for myself, but I'm not the one who has to plan it or pay the bill, so I leave these things up to other people who will, after all, already be having a rough couple of days.

Interestingly, while I do somewhat object to the idea of having a Jewish funeral, the idea of a shiva doesn't bother me at all. For the benefit of those who aren't familiar with the term, in the wake of the death of an immediate family member, Jews will spend seven(ish) days sitting at home, with all mirrors covered, neglecting their personal hygiene and mourning the dead person. As often as possible, friends and more distant relatives come to visit and sit for a few hours, keeping the mourners company, bringing them free food, giving them a chance to talk and tracking mud into the house. It's really a rather interesting and pragmatic process, because it's meant to ensure that the bereaved aren't alone and don't have to cook, and after seven days they've had a chance to really come to terms with their grief and are ready to move on with their lives prohibited from listening to music for some ridiculously long period of time. If you can look past the mandatory prayers which the bereaved are obligated to perform at inconvenient times of the day, it's really a wonderfully designed process, obligating people to spend time coming to terms with their feelings and their loss and trying to force as many friends as possible to come and pay their respects. The family receives a lot of love and support in a trying time and the caterer makes a mint. Even if it wasn't a Jewish tradition, I'd want the people I left behind to have something along those lines, because, deprived of my sparkling banter, they probably need the company.

Of course, all that being said, I don't plan to die for a long time yet, and I fully intend that when I go, I'll leave behind not just a family but a sizeable Empire to mourn my passing, and it's entirely possible that it won't be Jews who will be footing the bill for my funeral by then. Or that I'll have forsaken my heathen ways, become a better Jew, and not mind so much... that, too, is possible, but for now seems slightly less likely than the first option. Either way, check back in June 2087 to find out.

Once every week, with the exception of the week of an exam, my class has a usually non-mandatory two-hour lecture about "physicianship" wherein some aspect of the psychosocial side of medicine is explored. My first time in first year, I attended every single one of these lectures with the exception of one day during the High Holidays. I attended in part because these lectures were pretty much the closest thing we got to psychology lectures in the first year. I attended in part because most of the lecturers they brought in were men and women who straddle the line between "doctor" and "stand-up comedian." And, in part, I attended because I was going to be working with the course coordinator that summer and it cost me nothing to start scoring points with him early. This year, I've skipped out on the vast majority of those lectures, with said coordinator's permission; I've heard them all once already, after all, and those extra studying hours have proven very useful. Some of the sessions have proven interesting, however, or at least mandatory, and so I've made a point of attending those ones. One such mandatory session was this week's, the topic of which was spirutuality and medicine. The two hundred person class was broken up into groups of about 18, and each group spent two half-hour periods sitting down with a spokesperson for a major religion and talking about how spirituality affects a patient (and a doctor). In the first of the two periods, the group leader (a Nice Jewish Boy) had everybody go around the table and say what faith, if any, they practice. I'd known this was probably going to happen -- I did it last year, after all -- and I was agonizing over an extremely difficult choice: what religion do I tell my classmates that I belong to?

This is a harder question than one might think, for two reasons. The bigger reason is that I don't like being asked to explain my beliefs on the spot in a setting with a short time-limit; if I raise my hand and say "my name's Eric and I'm a Silinist and a Discordian" then I've tossed out two words which most of my classmates have never heard before. Inevitably, I'm asked to explain those terms, and while I'm fully capable of explaining and defending them, out of a thirty-minute period, I've just eaten up (and arguably wasted) a big chunk of time, possibly angering a group leader (and likely a physician with whom I might someday be working) by taking up his precious session. So, do I just say I'm Jewish and be done with it? I could, but that's very unsatisfying, very much untrue, and also gives the wrong impression to my classmates who are now deprived of something interesting to ask me about. Last year, I opted for a happy medium; I said I was a Silinist, and when questionned, answered evasively that it would take too long to explain and that we should probably keep things moving. And, indeed, when I checked a few days later, there had apparently been a brief upsurge in the number of people finding my religious writings via google, which suggests that some of my classmates actually went and, being well-trained medical students, looked it up. This year, though, I chose to play nice and not cause even that much trouble, no matter how much I would dearly have loved to. When my turn came, I said "pagan" -- which is true, strictly speaking -- and then clammed up. The doctor leading the group immediately smiled at me and told me to be careful because the full moon was coming up... so much for religious tolerance.

It's okay, though. I'm not at all bitter about having been spoken down to. All is forgiven, you half-shaven four-eyed shiny-headed half-literate pig-nosed genewaste.

So, time and courtesy together constitute one major reason why I played nice. The other is that, against all reason, I seem to have become embarassed discussing my religious leanings.

This isn't to say I'm embarassed by my beliefs. I'm proud to be a Silinist and a Discordian. in a one-on-one setting, with classmates or others of my general age category, I'm extremely open about all the things I believe, no matter how irrational they sound. I'm well aware that my beliefs sound like a joke -- that's half the fun, and privately, I get a kick out of it every time somebody looks like I'm crazy or smiles because they think I'm making a joke. Somehow, though, the idea of looking a fifty year old physician that I worship a big penguin and the Goddess of Chaos gives me pause. I's odd... you'd almost think I don't want people to think I'm weird. There I was, faced with a perfectly viable occasion to bring a little slice of confusion into the lives of fourteen classmates (three of them already know who and what I am, so they would have taken it in stride), and I opted to be subtle, to stay under the radar, to avoid the spotlight, and, shockingly, to play well with others.

In retrospect, I sort of feel like I missed an opportunity. By all rights, by the time that session ended, I should have been able to wrap copper wire around the heads of my classmates and use them to generate electricity. Instead I told them I'm a pagan and allowed them to laugh at -- and not with -- me. Worse, even now, one or more humans may be walking around believing I'm a Wiccan, and I've taken horrible vengeance on people for smaller insults than that.

Why should I be embarassed by my beliefs? This may be hard to believe, but when you tell the average person that you're a priest of the Great Penguin, no matter how deadpan your delivery, they tend to think you're joking. In a rare moment of absolute honesty, I'll say right now, for the record, that the idea of a divine Aptenodytes forsteri makes precisely as much sense to me as a jackal, raven, or, for that matter, human stuck with pointy bits. National Lampoon used to make occasional references to the Cosmic Muffin as being on the wacky end of the divinity scale, but really, the only thing that makes it more silly than a hammer-wielding hairy thunderer is human conceit and a love of looking at other bipeds. Forsteri makes a lot more intuitive sense to me than most popular gods I could name, and the religion is a lot more loving and people-friendly than the ones who run the world right now. By all rights, I ought to be more embarassed to call myself Jewish or Christian than Silinist.

What it really comes down to is strength in numbers. I'm a little embarassed to be the only representative of a small religion in a room full of cliches.

Obviously, this kind of embarassment is a problem for me. Here I am, fully intending to rule the world and become the leader of a major world faith and I get embarassed even saying the name of my god in front of a dozen Unawakened. This is, at best, a stumbling block to my plans. I could imagine a few reasonable solutions -- as high priest, for example, I've certainly got the power to decide that henceforth Forsteri should be known as Aptenodytes, Who Dives But Does Not Fly Through Reality, and then at least I've got the Greek sound to the name which always adds an air of mystique and professionalism to any god. That sort of solution only works if nobody asks any follow-up questions, though, and besides, I don't really want people to start thinking that I lifted my primary god from another source and didn't have it in me to have created my own. The solution, I suspect, is not to change my god -- who is after all divine and, while very much not perfect, is certainly pretty nifty -- but to change whatever it is within me which, even after all these years, fears being diferent from Da Crowd. A perfect self would exist utterly independent of social perceptions and have no fear of a little bit of embarassment, but I'm not a perfect self and while I'm capable of doing all kinds of weird stuff in public without so much as a flutter in my pulse rate, at the core of it, I still sometimes act a little shy.

So, let's start the CBT right now, shall we? My name is Eric, and I worship Forsteri, the Great Penguin, god of Balance and creativity, patron of the silly and protector of the nifty, a god I made up in the first place. I'm an apostate and a heathen and maybe just a little funny in the head, and I'm proud of it. I worship Forsteri, who is sometimes known as Aptenodytes The Misleadingly Named, god of Storytellers and Deceivers. In my spare time, I venerate the Goddess, Eris, whose holy book was penned by stoners and acid-heads in the sixties and who from time to time doesn't really stop to think about the consequences of Her actions but who's really a decent sort, deep down, and always keeps Her promises if you can get Her to make it specific and remind Her once in a while. I may have invented most of what I worship and I may not have an army of a million cofaithful behind me, but poke me thricewise if I don't honestly believe I've seen more miracles in ten years than most people do in their lifetime. I am not embarassed by my faith... I'm bloody proud of it and jusifiably so!

So that's me standing up for my beliefs, in text and with nobody watching or able to easily respond. Step two will be trying that in front of actual humans.

Legends speak of the great Roman general Baelinus, who served on Hadrian's Walls in ancient days back when this whole "Western Civilization" thing still seemed like a new and exciting idea. In those days, of course, the single greatest threat to the Roman empire was widely believed to be the Picts, barbarian warriors so fierce that they would charge into battle wearing nothing but blue ink, because being frostbitten and unable to properly move their arms and legs was the only way to give the Romans a fighting chance and make the whole thing challenging. Mighty though the were, the Picts were consistently held back by the Romans due to three factors. First and foremost was Hadrian's Wall itself which, much like many other giant bloody great walls in history, was specifically engineered to keep out the roudy neighbours. Second and almost equally important were the superior Roman tactics, which ensured that even if two Romans were felled by a single claymore, two more were standing by with Big Pointy Things to take advantage of the Pictish "no armour" policy. Thirdly, Roman military invention was quite a bit further along than the Pictish equivalents, particularly the siege engines. Romans typically fielded catapults and ballistae, which had been in common practice since the days of Greeks long before. According to legend, Baelinus found himself in command on a small legion when, one morning, a vast horde of Picts began to assemble on the horizon. Baelinus immediately and sensibly ordered up his artillery, only to find that due to the sort of clerical error (all too common in a society where nobody was ever sure what order words were supposed to be in when they composed sentences), his position had been equipped with thirty ballista bows but only catapult ammunition. A lesser man might have fallen upon his own sword right then and there, but Baelinus, himself an engineer before entering the military, immediately brought up his siege crews and ordered them to modify the ballistae to fire rocks instead of bolts. The Romans had two hours to prepare, and only four ballistae were functional when the Picts attacked, but Baelinus' quick-thinking had saved the day. When the Picts stormed the walls in their ten-man formations, they were met, not with giant arrows or falling boulders, both of which they were ready for, but with giagantic stones bouncing insanely along the ground at high speed. Picts were crushed and scattered every which way by, and Baelinus was hailed as a great hero. Such was his glory that his men fashioned a game recreating the battle, wherein they would lob heavy rock spheres at formation of ten wooden targets, which they named "Baeling." tragically, Baelinus himself died shortly after this due to a tragic accident when one of these Baeling Balls escaped the grasp of a drunked legionnaire, but the game which bears his name -- basically -- perists to this day.

I've been told in the past that I throw unusually good parties; more than one individuals has told me that parties held at my house are among the most eagerly-awaited of the year in my social circles. I've always taken this with a grain of salt, myself, and I strongly suspect that anybody who brings people into their home and does a halfway-decent job of hosting them gets told the same basic thing. That said, people do seem to consistently have good times at events I organize, which I feel a great deal of pleasure in. As I see it, I've got no real talent for planning or executing an event, but I do have one gift: I find interesting people and find convenient times for them to get together and interact. I don't throw good parties; I invite the right people. On that note, cheers to the people who helped me celebrate the end of my neurology unit by going bowling. A higher-than-expected turnout was achieved and an apparently wonderful time was had by all, even if I did severely underestimate how much the evening would cost everyone who attended (who knew bowling was so expensive? I'm going into the wrong business, I tell you).

Bowling's actually an excellent way to get people together for an evening, if you think about it. You get a venue with ample seating and assuming you've got enough people to fit them at two adjascent lanes (say, anything between 8 and 12 people, at least at the alley we went to) then everyone's close enough to mingle but spread out enough to have lots of personal space. The game itself offers enough physical activity to help fight off restlessness, and players find themselves rolling the little round rocks often enough to stay interested in the game while still having long enough breaks between turns to have time to socialize. And, perhaps most importantly, bowling provides the rare and much-appreciated opportunity to hurl rocks at pieces of wood, and this, alone, is well worth giving up an evening. Add in a candidate for the World's Cutest Teddy-Bear award and a a number of people feeling unusually huggy, and you can't lose.

Lastly, it helps considerably if everyone who attends is a very bad bowler. Bad players are funnier.

This was the first time I'd gone bowling in about four or five years, and it's kind of interesting to notice the different things I focused on this time compared to last time. The last time I went bowling, for example, I defintely wouldn't have spent four minutes trying to calculate the coefficient of friction of the lanes. Some of the other players noted that the bowling balls all seemed oddly greasy and yucky, which they appeared to attribute to dirty-handed players using the balls. While this was in part no doubt true, the alley actually had several small signs up warning people not to go out onto the lanes because, to facilitate movement of the balls, the lanes were all greased -- the alley was actually designed to be a nearly-frictionless environment, which is really a sensible way to build a bowling alley if you think about it but which I'd never noticed before. The players who thought the balls were yucky because they were oily would be relieved to know that the oil wasn't of human origin, and so they didn't have to be so worried about wiping it off of their hands. The flip side of this, of course, is that human skin is lipid-soluble and oils pass right through it into the body more easily than water, so while the oil itself is probably better for you than the germs of the other players, it does ensure that whatever germs are on the balls have a better-than-even chance of getting absorbed right into your system instead of staying on the outside as they would if they were suspended in aqueous sweat.

While we're on the topic of oil, anyone who's bemoaning the fact that I'm not going to make any lubrication jokes can insert your own here. And get your mind out of the gutter.

For my part, I was pleasantly surprised by how well I bowled, considering that since my first year of undergraduate studies, the closest I've come to practicing the game is playing the Wii (which, by the way, is actually a better physical workout than real bowling is). On the Wii, my normal score is about 150, though this is with the added crutch of a lasersight and aiming reticle as you play. While actually bowling, my score was quite a bit less impressive, my aim was quite a bit less true, and my shots ended up in up in the gutters quite a lot more frequently. My lowest score of the night was in the low seventies, and my highest broke one hundred and twenty (brought up, in large part, by ending the game with three strikes and a spare which somehow I completely failed to replicate in the frames which followed). In an ideal world, I would have broken one hundred in each of the three games I played -- which would have necessitated more frames of hitting more than a single pin, obviously -- but if you averaged my score over the evening it would have come out to more than one hundred per game, and thanks to the twin miracles of rationalization and cognitive dissonance, that's good enough for me.

Anyway, the important thing was just going out and hurling rocks at things. The rest is just details.

I'd like to extend my thanks to everyone who took the time to send me a nice card or something in the last three days. It's always touching to be reminded how many people out there care enough to wish a happy birthday, particularly when you actively avoid reminding them yourself that the day is coming up. I try very hard to remember when the birthdays of people I care about are, and for most of the year, it astounds me that most people get all choked up by the simple gesture of remembering to wish them a good day. That's most of the year, of course... for two days each year (once at my birthday, once at my rebirthday), I'm apparently just as sentimental as anybody else. Even better than people remembering was seeing the effort a lot of people put into their greetings... I received several multi-paragraph e-mails, a handful of poetic blessings in parody of the birthday letters I like to write myself, three actual paper cards filled up with hand-written affection, and assorted other joys. And extra thanks go out to the people who did a little something extra special, such as to the remarkable lady who text-messaged me different happy-birthday messages no less than seven times during the day, the beautiful and wonderul woman who baked me a giant smiley-faced peanut-butter cookie, and my incomparable parents, who against all common sense found for me an electronic penguin which acts as a portable speaker for an MP3 player and dances along with the music (male/male cable, but not batteries, included).

I'm loved. Feels good.

I've got an odd sort of feeling that I ought to be making a bigger deal of my birthday this year than I have been up to now. Twenty-five is traditionally one of those "milestone" birthdays -- for the next year, my touch is supposed to be able to burn werewolves or something -- and there's something nagging at me that this should matter to me. It doesn't, obviously, being overshadowed by rather a lot of other Stuff going on for me -- but those nagging feelings tend not to be so courteous as to provide us with nice, times-new-roman-printed documents explaining their motivations. This *is* likely to be a special sort of year for me, I suppose, so maybe it's characteristically poetic that I have a milestone-ish day preceeding.

The silver birthday, they call it. If that makes me silver age, then I can look forward to a year where I act all noble, nobody around me uses swear-words, and I neatly defeat all of my foes within half an hour or a three-issue story-arc. If that's the case, I'll be on schedule to turn Grim-&-Gritty just in time for me to enter third year medicine. If you see me having coffee with Frank Miller, run.

It is going to be a big year, to be honest. Within three months, I'll have finished the first year of medical school (correctly, this time), moved out on my own, most likely finished writing at least one new manuscript for academic publication, submitted some non-academic writings to at least three publishers, done some real storytelling for the first time in years, sacrificed a goat to the forces of darkness in exchange for unholy power, and hosted an international convention of micronationalists. This doesn't even take me past August, at which point my classes will resume and I'll finally be learning material which is actually directly relevant to healing wounded humans, and within five months of that I'll be in the hospitals and wearing a shiny white coat (the kind where the sleeves don't attach together in back, for a change). By the time I hit twenty six (the Topin Wagglegammon of birthdays, if you will), I expect to have gone through at least four experiences which a normal human would classify as "life-changing," and this is likely a conservative estimate based on what I hear from classmates who are now a year ahead of me. The part of me which lies in wait, ready to pounce and proclaim itself Eric 5.0, cackles madly at the prospect, while the majority of my brain and soul will settle for having a nice high cumulative average come June 21st. It's a clear-cut case of amygdala and septal area battling it out for supremacy, with pineal gland sitting on the throne and hoping everyone else is too distracted to notice.

I'm also expecting to have become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice by this time next year. There's no reason why I would be, but it's nice to have high expectations.

Thank you again to everyone who sent warm wishes on the 8th (or ninth, or tenth, or whatever... what's a little temporal displacement between friends?). I don't care much about my birthdays and it doesn't bother me in the least if people forget or ignore it, but when people choose to actively remember it even when they know I don't really care, that's a sign that they're really doing it because they *want* to and not because they feel obliged. I feel very lucky to have people who want to see me happy and don't just mouth the words. I look forward to reciprocating the kindness before this time next year.

Today, my Empire turns twenty years old. It's a bit of a sobering thought sometimes when I ponder how long I've been working on it for... as of today, four-fifths of my life have been spent trying to conquer the world, with the paper-trail to prove it. I'm accomplished some pretty astoundingly nifty stuff through the Empire, which I won't bother going into right now, since much of it's been the subject of previous Entries. What I will talk about here, though, is something which may or may not be of particular interest to people who read this. I'm always looking for ways to share the joy I get from the Empire with the people around me, and so...

You are warmly invited to join Eric Lis on the twenty first of July, 2007, in welcoming citizens from far and wide across the face of the Aerican Empire to the city of Montreal, Canada, for the first ever Aerican Imperial Convention. Some of the highest members of the Imperial government will travel to Montreal from distant countries to gather and celebrate twenty years of chaos, conquest, and cookies. And you, you're invited, you lucky person you. Guests will gather at the luxurious Comfort Inn Montreal Aeroport, 700 Boul St Jean, Pointe Claire for a full day of fun, excitement, entertainment, and schmoozing. No killer penguin death squads are expected.

Schedule of events:
Friday, July 20th: Guests begin to arrive in Montreal.
Saturday, July 21st, AM:
12:00: Midnight. July 21st begins.
8:00: Convention begins. Everyone sleeps through it.
9:00: The Emperor gets out of bed. Checks e-mail, sends mocking letters to international citizens unable to afford air-fare to Canada.
11:00: Breakfast at hotel (free for guests) or nearby restaurant (not free, but more people can attend).
12:00: Become confused by twelve-hour clocks versus twenty-four hour clocks.

PM:
12:00-1:00: People realise convention began twelve hours ago and arrive at the hotel.
1:00-1:30: Introductions, meet&greet for out-of-town citizens and local citizens. Mock non-citizen attendees.
1:30-2:00: Opening ceremonies. Speech by the Emperor. Speech by whoever else has something to say. Peanut gallery makes snarky comments, ceremony degenerates into talking about gaming and/or Star Trek.
2:00-2:15: Decide where to go for lunch.
2:15-2:20: Travel to place chosen for lunch (probably Rockaberries or other coffee and pie restaurant).
2:20-2:40: Conquer restaurant in the name of the Empire. Graciously allow serving staff to live in exchange for menus, drinks.
3:00: Lunch arrives.
3:00-5:00: Schmooze. Discuss life as an Imperial citizen.
5:00-6:00: Zen walking tour of Montreal. Actual walking tour of "simulated Retsaot Colony" (actually nearby park).
6:00-6:30: Argue about where to go for dinner.
6:30-6:35: Travel to place chosen for dinner (probably Moe's Deli and Bar, for smoked meat).
6:35-7:00: Conquer restaurant. Graciously allow serving staff to live in exchange for menus, drinks, free bread, extra butter.
7:00-9:00: Eat, schmooze, whine about border crossing and/or customs, "impersonate a barnyard animal" contest.
9:00: Leave restaurant. Killer Penguin sighting; false alarm, turns out to be a squirrel.
9:00-9:10: Argue about where to go next.
9:00-12:00: Free period: movie at nearby theatre or more schmoozing at hotel.
12:00: July 22nd begins. Convention ends. Generously cede control of newly conquered lands back to previous owners with minimal loss of life. Bedtime.

And that, quite frighteningly, is the actual convention schedule of events. Some of it might get changed around a bit -- if the out-of-town guests want to get an earlier start than I'm expecting, for example, or if the out-of-towners would like to make a visit/pilgrimage to the fabled Aerican Embassy to Everything Else to see where the Empire began. All in all, it should be a tremendous amount of fun, especially if I can get a good-sized crowd to show up so that we can take a picture to put on the website which vastly exagerates the apparent number of attendees.

Trust the Empire. Serve the Empire. Obey the Empire. And above all, join the Empire, because we have a lot of fun there.

It is sometimes said that nowadays, the measure of a scientist isn't how brilliant they are, how original their theories, or what new grounds they break in their field or fields of interest. The measure of a scientist, today, is their ability to be published. There may be some truth and validity to this point of view; being published today means, in theory, that your work has been evaluated by educated and intelligent reviewers who have seen merit in your work, and furthermore, if the physicist who perfects cold fusion never manages to tell anyone, the world will not be much changed for the efforts. Of course, getting your name into the journals isn't necessarily proof of competence, brilliance, or any other redeming feature, as several of Montreal's "top thinkers" proove anew every time they get themselves printed, and not every journal's editorial staff is educated, intelligent, or unbiased, and yes, every once in a while you have someone who makes a true world-altering discovery and they can't get their article published because nobody believes them, bu in principle, every publication in a modern peer-reviwed journal is a milestone in a scientist's life and career because it is recognition from the wider scientific world that their work has meaning, purpose, significance, and scientific merit. So, in theory even if not always in real life, getting an article published in a respected journal is a pretty big deal.

And I just got my first publication. You saw that coming, because I was being uncharacteristically nice when discussing an academic institution.

As most of the people reading this already know, I spent last summer working with a psychiatrist from the Montreal Children's Hospital. The tale of how I got hired is one of my favourite examples of what I mean when I say that some days I've got the devil's own luck. Last winter, when I began to ponder what I'd want to do over the summer, I took a good, hard look at my CV and came face to face with the fact that aside from "researching", "writing" and "lying" I have no real marketable talents. Given the choice of trying to take my three main skills and get myself into a laboratory or go out and get a real job, I picked a nice young psychiatrist on the simple basis that he was standing in the same room as me when the idea crossed my mind, and asked him if he knew anyone who might be looking for a research assisstant. The very first thing he said to me was, "I'm actually looking for someone to work on a project. Do you have any writing skills?" Some days the Goddess just kisses you right on the lips and slips a twenty into your pocket while you're distracted.

The upshot of this, of course, was that I spent my summer reading neuroimaging papers which I barely understood and writing about them. The original plan was for me to create a database of articles all about what medicine has learned about the neuroanatomical and physiological changes associated with borderline personality disorder, and then use that information to write the grant proposal for a paper which my boss planned to work on in the near future. Neither one of us had taken into account my ability to process huge volumes of information very rapidly, or my incredibly and unecessarily verbose writing style, and by the time my introduction had reached ten pages it became clear that we would have enough material to get a full manuscript out of it. In point of fact, by the time I'd finished the whole manuscript, it had grown so long that the main criteria I needed when looking for journals to submit it to was that they had to be willing to take articles as long as mine, which most weren't by a margin of one thousand words.

And then the article got accepted. It wasn't original research, but it was quite wonderfully written, and the journal snapped it right up after only one request that we take it back and Change Stuff -- the various doctors involved assured me that it's incredibly unusual for an article to be accepted on the first resubmission, but of course, you can't trust psychiatrists when they tell you things like that. And so, this month, in the May issue of the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, you'll see my name, followed by the names of a whole bunch of better-paid but much less important people.

One interesting thing in seeing the article printed was observing the changes made by their editors. My writing is a lot of things -- brilliant, engaging, let's not hold back on the positive adjectives tonight -- but it's not really academic. When I wrote this manscrupt, I didn't use contractions, I avoided colloquialisms, I defined and operationalized my scientific terminology, and by spending a week's worth of will dots I managed to stop myself from hiding a single fnord in the paper. Despite all that, everyone who read the manuscript commented to me that it read oddly like prose rather than like a proper Ben Stein academic monotone. This made the paper easy to read and fun to write, but apparently the JPN's editors took issue and, persumably because they get paid by the word, they made countless little changes to the structure and syntax. Make no mistake, I'm not criticizing; the editors did an excellent job and offered me many chances to give input on their changes, and I'm really grateful for their efforts in making my manuscript more accessible to the presumably over-starched and uptight professional world, but the end result of their work was that my manuscript no longer wholly read like my manuscript... my words were there, but they didn't sound like me anymore. For example, here's the very second line from the manuscript and final paper:

Eric's: BPD is associated with high rates of suicide, such that nearly all sufferers of BPD have experienced suicidal ideation and almost ten percent commit suicide by adulthood.
Editors': BPD is associated with high rates of suicide — nearly all BPD patients have experienced suicidal ideation and almost 10% commit suicide by adulthood.

Eric's: While psychosocial causes of BPD have been explored in many studies, relatively little data exists regarding biological causes.
Editors': Although psychosocial causes of BPD have been explored in many studies, relatively little data exist regarding biological causes.

Eric's: Whether because of the difficulty in finding BPD sufferers to participate or the relative youth of the technologies used, the neurologic and genetic factors of BPD have not yet been fully explored.
Editors': The neurological and genetic factors of BPD have not yet been fully explored, perhaps because it is difficult to find BPD subjects to participate or because the technologies used are relatively young.

Then again, maybe I'm just a bit too close to the source to be objective. I have been known to get funny like that sometimes.

The important thing isn't how many changes got made or whether I approve of every little text edit, but rather that I've had an academic article published. My name is now that much easier to find on Google, to say nothing of Pubmed. I'm one step closer to being able to rightly and justly call myself a mad scientist, having now contributed to academic knowledge. Assuming I finally get around to passing the first year of medical school and don't run into any "setbacks" in the three years that follow, having an academic publication -- in a genuinely prestigious journal -- will go a long way to helping me get the job I want in favour of somebody smarter, more charming, or more competent than I am. I've made a number of useful contacts while working on this, particularly since three doctors who had almost nothing to do with the project got their names added to the paper and thus arguably owe me a favour. And, because I did a good job on this project, my boss has spent the last year telling me how badly he wants me to keep working with him and has already put my name down to be included on another three or four papers he has in the works, even if I never give him another hour's work again. And, probably most important... I spent the summer working at something interesting and moderately exciting, and got something tangible to show for it. Not a lot of people I know get to say that.

The author would like to acknowledge and thank CIHR for paying him sit at home and watch cartoons.

People often ask me how often, in a given day, I'll lie. When asked this, I'll usually respond that it's not something I think about it. I'll say that I couldn't really think of a good way to keep track since I believe most people aren't really aware of how many times they lie during a given day. Most people like constantly without giving it much thought, after all. A large part of this problem is probably that there are a lot of different kinds of lies, including various sorts that a lot of people rarely think about. I don't think about this sort of thing much, personally, but given that I have some small interest in the study of deception, it's probably well worth some time to consider just how many types of lies there really might be. There probably aren't very many.

There's an ancient saying which says that there are three kinds of lies: normal lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is, of course, a small understatement. Most people would probably admit that they tell all sorts of other, smaller lies during the day. I've commented before on the phenomenon that when most people ask how you are, they don't really want a lengthy answer, but we rarely stop to think that most people might not want to *give* a full answer, either. Most people usually aren't fine, after all, and even a low-grade sub-niftyness, by all rights, ought to be enough to make the average person un-fine. Giving a long (and accurate) answer, though, takes a lot of two things most people don't have: time, and energy. It's hard work, and worse, it requires that we stop to think about how we're really doing. It's not easy to process the question and then work out the eleven or twelve things going on in your life at a given time that make you less than fine, so we take the weasel way out and we say we're fine. It's not so much courtesy as laziness. It's also a harmless little lie that most people probably tell ten or fifteen times each day, if they're lucky enough to have that many people motivated to ask them. Of course, it's not a deliberate lie for most of you; for me, it's just another chance to amuse myself by putting one more small untruth into the world.

The Inuit have more than fifty words for snow. This sounds like a lot, until you consider that Montrealers have almost that many too, and nearly as many if not more for types of rain. We observe subtle distinctions in types and use a well-considered system of deciding what the weather actually is outside, so that we can best communicate to our colleagues and neighbours why it's horrible outside. We have huge numbers of words for everything important and which we feel the need to divide up by subtle differences. It strikes me as odd, then, as I assume it must strike a lot of other people, that we have so *few* words for types of lies. Oh, we've got no shortage of synonyms for the verb "to lie," including but hardly limited to beguile, bluff, cheat, defraud, delude, doom, dupe, fool, hoodwink, misguide, misinform, mislead, snow, trick, and my personal favourites, rook and deceive. Those words all relate to the action, however; they don't distinguish quality, quantity, or subjective experience in the same way that, for example, "drizzle" does from "downpour" or "snowflakes" does from "blizzard." The English language is, in fact, terribly deficient in words which mean different types, severities, and sinfulness of kinds of lies. So now we're going to make some up.

What is a lie, at heart? We might define it as the act of relating an untruth with deliberate forethought and effort of invention, and indeed, Webster itself specifies that a lie is characterised by intent and malice of forethought. Right away, therefore, we can distinguish a lie from a "mistake," an untruth spoken without intent. Of course, a mistake might be in good faith or might be driven by some unconcious desire to obfuscate the truth, and so we can distinshuish the "honest mistake" from the "Freudian mistake." The Freudian mistake can be further subdivided into a mistake made for fear of telling the truth -- a phobic Freudian mistake -- and a mistake made out of a true desire to prevent someone from learning what they ought to know -- a Machiavellian Freudian mistake. And, strictly speaking, we're not even into the true lies yet.

You may want to go get a snack. I can keep doing this all night.

How about the lie mentioned above? Someone sees you for the first time that day and, out of good and honest courtesy and friendship but not out of curiosity, they ask how you are. There's no word in English which covers this precise situation, which is why I've decided that it should be called a courlie. You know that the other person doesn't want to hear a long speech, and most likely you don't want to *make* a long speech, so you courlie; you lie, and it's the polite thing to do for the both of you. The courlie is, of course, a subtype of the "white lie," a lie told to protect someone else or preserve their feelings and not told with any negative motivations. There are, of course, many forms of white lies, such as the prolie, told with the intent to protect someone from an explicitly harmful truth, and the pallie, meant to protect someone's feelings from an unkind but not truly harmful truth. Both of these are, of course, far less noble than a lie told to protect the physical safety of another, as when you turn the forces of evil away from your best friend's house; as any philosopher will tell you, in that situation, you ethically kantlie.

None of this covers the really fun forms of lying, though, so let's look at those quickly. Even the most passionate deceiver would likely agree that to tell a lie with malice and with the deliberate intent of causing harm for harm's own sake isn't justifiable by any sensible code of ethics; it might even be fair to call such an act uglie or badlie. There are lies told with deliberate intent, not to cause harm, but to protect oneself selfishlie, as when one insists that the check is in the mail or that the important e-mail to your boss must have gotten lost due to a server outage. How about my own favourite form of lie, though: the lie told with the complete absence of unkindness or cruelty, the lie told for its own sake, for the art of the deception, and for the sake of a good laugh all around? To me, at least, the very greatest and most magnificient lie is its own reward, a pure and perfect joy which comes only from rewriting the reality itself. This is what it means to deceive artfullie... one might almost say that, if a beautiful lie changes the subjective universe, the act is practically godlie.

Which brings us to 30 and plenty for tonight. Now I'm off go watch TV.

One of the nice things about my class is that at the beginning of each unit, we receive an Astonishingly Large course-pack which contains, in theory, all of the notes which we will be required to know for the relevant exam. One of the nice things about this course-pack is that some few professors put a little bit of effort into making their notes a little more fun or thought-provoking. To this end, one of our lecturers recently opened his notes with a quote... a small but appreciated attempt on his part to put a little something different into our notes before burying us in very much more of the same ol'. The quote was "quod sum eris," a cute little Latin phrase which rolls of the tongue easily even if it does lack the ring to it of such other phrases as quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari. Loosely translated (and, in fact, even acurately translated, for once), the phrase means "I am that which you will be." From a doctor to a medical student, it's a clever quote to include (even if not wholly accurate, given the incredible improbability of my ending up a neurologist). As always, however, the surface meaning isn't what amused me about seeing the quote... if it was, I'd have had to write my first paragraph about something else instead, to ensure I get to take a good running start before reaching anything resembling a point.

Let's look at the words themselves quickly. Quod sum eris. The astute reader might have alreday guessed which bit caught my eye. "Quod" is a boring word. It's inelegant, stubby, and dull, having a sound not unlike six pounds of semi-solid pudding falling on the floor. To its credit, quod does come ambitiously close to sounding like "plod," but this alone is not enough to make it interesting. Quod is the part of the phrase which means "that which" and aside from giving me the urge to go put some marshmallows between two slices of bread it does absolutely nothing for me. Sum is a more fun word, and anything that translates as "I am" is always a phrase of some inherent interestingyness. Sadly, when I see the word "sum" the first thing that occurs to me is not philosophy, but mathematics, and few things spoil a good mood for me as quickly as abstract addition and subtraction (as opposed to practical addition, such as "this much money is being deposited into my account," or practical subtraction, such as "this many of my foes have been wiped from the face of the earth today"). So, if "quod" isn't interesting and "sum" isn't interesting, you don't have to be able to see the fnords to be able to guess which word it is that's left me with the quote occupying my brain.

"Eris" is Latin for "you will be." I've mentionned before how I've always taken that sort of congruence in my life to be a sign from the gods that I'm doing right.

Time for some idea-jumping. Eris is the Greek name for the Goddess of Chaos who has, as far as I can tell, brought me an astounding number of joy and no small amount of horror, agony, and furustration in the years I've worshipped her. At the time that Eris was known in ancient Greece, her name was not equivalent to the Latin word; the Greek word for "you will be" was closer in pronouciation to "eiste" (or, if I was feeling unecessarily whimsical, "AE-iste"). The Latin word eris didn't apply to any gods, since She was known by that time as Discord or Discordia. We can probably rule out any sort of deliberate decision to take the Goddess' name and turn it into a verb, particularly since, back then, She wasn't looked upon as fondly as She is today (although She might have been associated with concepts like change, adaption, and what people will one day become). What we're left with is just another in the long series of coincidences which I'm reasonably convinced are really just little in-jokes and easter eggs that the gods hide throughout the world for me to occasionally stumble across and get a good laugh out of.

The only way that finding out that the Latin word for "what you will become" is the name of the Goddess could be funnier or more apt in my life would be if the word had been "forsteri" or something... and that might have been pushing the laws of probability, even by my standards. It's hard to laugh at a joke if the setup causes reality to implode.

Annoyingly, I still find myself just over two hundred words short of one thousand, but that's all of got to say about it.

       "No."
       "Aww, come on. Don't be like that."
       "I told you, no."
       "Why in the Emperor's name not? You've already stuck all sorts of weird things in me over the years. You can't tell me this wouldn't be a worthwhile investment."
       "We fit your endoskeleton and exoskeleton with equipment you absolutely need to fulfill your duties. We don't put in-."
       "You gave me a barbeque lighter!"
       "Your 'portable flame source' has a million uses."
       "How about the dog whistle?"
       "Very useful for scaring away animals without attracting human attention."
       "The fiction library pre-installed on my hard drive."
       "KP agents often spend time with nothing to do and few movement options. We gave you some books to keep you busy and stimulated."
       "Oh come on. You put all kinds of features into me just because you can. I lost both my legs for you people last week, and all I'm asking is that you put a couple of useful upgrades into my replacements when you install them."
       Finally he loses his patience, spins on me, and shoves his finger in my face. He wouldn't be able to look down on me if I had legs right now, damn it.
       "For the LAST time... the very last time... we are not installing boot jets into you. We haven't even got the technology to give you boot jets. And if you ask me to give you boot jets one more time, I will personally see to it that the next time you go out on a mission, your main cannon has been replaced with a water-gun. It isn't as though you're going to find yourself about to be shot out of a catapult or something one day. You don't need to be able to fly for your work."
       The video clip ends and the window in the corner of my HUD closes with a quiet beep. That conversation took place years ago, but thanks to the miracle of having everything I see get stored in video format and be perfectly replayable, I can relive these moments any time I want. Say, for example, when I'm sitting in the scoop of a catapult, tied up, with a high-yield explosive sitting next to me, and haven't got anything else to do while high-priest something-or-other explains to his bretheren why they're going to kill me. I suppose I didn't *have* be watch videos to pass the time... after all, I've got all those books on-board I could be reading.
       I am sooo going to track him down and glue him to the ceiling or something. See if I don't.
       Of course, in an ideal world, I probably wouldn't be in a position to be fired out of a catapult in the first place, and one might certainly argue that if I did my job perfectly I would currently be in my hotel room relaxing and awaiting a recall signal. It might certainly be fair to say that had I really been on top of things, I would have quietly infiltrated these nutjobs, taken apart their cell from the inside through a cunning combination of sabotage and intimidation, and been home in time to stay up late partying and have it be my own fault that I didn't get a good night's sleep. Had I really, truly been prepared, I would probably not have found myself sitting in a catapult with a small fusion bomb, about to be part of the completly non-sensical suicide ritual of a cult of nuke-worshippers. And, most importantly, I wouldn't have had to listen to their high priest drone on and on about rejoining the great flame or whatever it was.
       I mean, seriously, they planned to kill themselves by launching a thermonuclear bomb out of a wooden catapult. They're half again too swirly for me to have any interest in what they're gonna say. I mean, with the obvious exception of "fire the catapult."
       "Have you any last words before you die, infidel?" the one in the pointy hat asks. I consider giving him a short speech -- say, something starting with "aardvark" and ending with "zyzzyva," just to see how long he'll let me go on for, but I'm gonna be late for the news as it is and I kinda just want to get this over with.
       "No, I'm good, thanks," I call down to him. I'm greeted by silence. they were probably expecting me to beg for my life or something, ask to be set free... in their heart of hearts, probably hoping I'll convert to their faith in the last moments of my life or something. I can just see pointy-hat's face over the lip of the scoop and he looks like he can't decide if he should be angry or flabbergasted; I take a screenshot of that look so I can appreciate it later.
       "Very well, then," he says. I'm expecting him to posture for a bit longer, so I'm impressed when he calls out, "cut the rope!" I'm a bit less thrilled when I hear the sound of a knife cutting into a rope, followed by a snap, but what the heck... I *did* want them to get on with it.
       See, here's how I figure they'd planned this. The clown troop masquerading as a doomsday cult down there built this catapult to symbolize "ancient technology" -- why they didn't just put a wooden board over a rock and call it a lever, I don't know or care -- and firing their bomb out of the catapult probably symbolizes the cycle of humanity or the interconnectedness of all things or the conquest of the primitive over the technological... whatever. The bomb's been set to detonate given a sufficient impact, which the catapult is pretty sure to provide. Putting me in here with it was most likely their way of providing me with an ironic and frightening death alongside them, but then, I've been put into death-traps by professionals and these morons don't come close. I'm sure they're looking forward to their last sight being a trussed up government agent flung into a stone wall. Of course, since I cut the ropes holding me fifteen minutes ago and have since been sitting with a death-grip on the bomb with one hand and my climbing claws dug into the wood of the scoop with the other and both of my feet, they're going to be disapointed, especially given how hard I intend to hit any of them who don't run away when I land.
       The scoop swings up in a perfect arc and slams to a stop at a near-perfect ninety degrees. My momentum stops at the same time, though my shoulder is nearly dislocated as momentum and inertia mutually file a complaint against me with the physics police. A cry of joy goes up from below me as the cultists look towards their flaming rapture -- a cry that dwindles off uncertainly as they begin to realise one-by-one that nothing has flown out of the scoop. I let that moment build for a second, enjoying it, then retract my claws. I drop to the ground and land as lightly as a five-hundred-pound solid metal kitten and then, very carefully, put down the bomb next to me.
       "You are all under arrest," I say, just to make it official.
       This next part is relatively crucial. There's a dozen men here with me, and each of them, ostensibly, is ready to trigger the bomb behind me and go to meet his maker. They probably aren't trained fighters and thos erobes they're wearing restrict their movement, so I could probably take any six of them at once. That said, if any one of them slips past me and pushes the "me explode now" button, my bulletproof armour and shiny helmet will do me about as much good as one of their robes will do them. The first time these guys took me down, when they got me tied up in the first place, was a lucky swing from mister pointy hat's taser catching me just right and briefly shorting out my corticospinal system. Based on everything I've seen of pointy hat, I'm gambling he's going to try the same thing again and that nobody else will make a move at first because they're fairly sure he's already got me dead to rights. And, indeed, with an inarticulate scream that probably has something to do with fire, he charges.
       This is what the world looks like when you have a computer in your head whose entire processing power is dedicated to combat probabilities. First off, time slows to a crawl as my perceptions shift into speeds that would burn out my brain if they were maintained for more than a few seconds. With agonixing slowness, pointy hate draws his taser, and a little number four -- a threat assesment index -- pops up next to him in my visual field. by the time he completes his first step, I'm looking at computerized projections of the twenty-five moves he's likely to make when he reaches me and two thing I could do to counter each of them. By the time he's moved another two steps, the number of options has grown to over two hundred and I've sorted carefully through half of them. When he's crossed half the distance to me, his threat index number drops to zero point five. In the eternity it takes him to actually reach me and start his swing -- the single most predictable and probable one he could have tried -- I check my e-mail and respond to two letters.
       I sidestep his swing and raise my right arm, palm flat towards the ground and fingers at his eye level. His rush carries him right alongside me and into a perfect clothesline position, but I'm not feeling so generous; I extend my middle and index fingers and he double-eye-pokes himself at sprinting speed. From human fingers, he's be in pain and temporarily blinded, maybe have a scratch to his cornea that would cripple him within a year. From my fingers, which are for all intents and purposes solid steel, he'd probably lose both eyes and be lucky not to break his nasal bone, but he'd survive. With my second and third climbing claw extended, blindness is the least and last of his worries. And then I activate the fusion cutter in my fingers and wiggle it around, because I'm a thorough kind of guy.
       "The rest of you are still under arrest," I say to the other cultists. Pointy hat slips off of my hand with a wet slurp and crumples to the ground, smoke rising from his right eye-socket, and his underlings choose the better part of valour. I let them go; my memory of their faces is admissible as evidence and in any case, by now, all the exits from this building are supposed to have been secured by the local security forces. I pick up the fusion bomb in my clean hand and walk towards the exit. I wonder if my boss will let me keep that catapult?