ÿþ<HEAD> <title>Eric's Archive</title> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Eric's Journal, the irregularly updated journal of Eric Lis"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="eric, lis, emperor, aerica, aerican, journal, eric's head"> </HEAD> <left><font face="Times New Roman"> <font face="Monotype Corsiva,Bernhard Modern Roman,Unicorn,BellGothic,News Gothic MT"> <center> <big><big><big><big> Eric's Archive<br> Entries 411-420<P> </big></big></big></big></font> <I> Those who forget the past<Br> Are doomed to reread it.<p></i> </center> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/index.html">More recent</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/421-430.html">Entries 421-430</a><BR> <a href="#420">Entry 420</a> November 19 2007<br> <a href="#419">Entry 419</a> November 16 2007<br> <a href="#418">Entry 418</a> November 13 2007<br> <a href="#417">Entry 417</a> November 10 2007<br> <a href="#416">Entry 416</a> November 7 2007<br> <a href="#415">Entry 415</a> November 4 2007<br> <a href="#414">Entry 414</a> November 1 2007<br> <a href="#413">Entry 413</a> October 29 2007<br> <a href="#412">Entry 412</a> October 26 2007<br> <a href="#411">Entry 411</a> October 23 2007<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/401-410.html">Entries 401-410</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="420"></a> <U><B>The Game The Whole Family Can Play</b></u><p> This past weekend was a great big celebration for my grandfather's eighty-fifth birthday, his wife's birthday, and their anniversary. This was a sufficiently big event that the Toronto side of the family came into town, which is always a lot of fun and much looked forward to by those of us in Montreal. I had the priviledge of spending much time with cousins I don't see enough of, and I couldn't help but notice something interesting as we all sat around. Including both my maternal and paternal close family, there are a total of eight cousins whose ages range from thirty six to nineteen. Among those eight individuals -- of whom I'm one, obviously -- I can state with certainty that while all of us are moderately proud of being Jewish culturally and genetically, to one degree or another, for at least five of the eight and probably more, the idea of following the Jewish religion would seem slightly absurd an certainly not to our tastes. I come from a family of apostates, it would seem. This isn't for any lack of belief on the parts of the parents', though each of the four households in question can be said to have had varrying degrees of religiosity and none of them were ever anything approaching orthodox. I wouldn't say that any of us rejected Judaism, so much as we all sorted of drifted away from it, more out of boredom than anything else. I can't really put my finger on why this should be. I think in part my family may have made one catastrophic error in designing our religious upbringings: they made Judaism about family and community but not about fear and smiting. I look forward to the major holidays because I get to see and sit with people I'm fond of and might otherwise not see, and not because I worry that failing to properly observe each step in the feast will bring upon me ruination or death. Such ideas have always been a joke in my family, in fact... at Friday night dinners, for example, my grandfather would joke that if anybody ate a piece of bread before we'd done the appropriate blessing, the ceiling would collapse. Inevitably, once in a while, some precocious individual ate some bread or drank some wine before <I>ha'motzi</i> and <i>kiddush</i> and his house was still in fine shape when he sold it a few years ago, and we all laughed, where a strictly orthodox household might scold a child for eating before thanking god for the food. The wrath of the divine king of kings is reduced to a running gag and before you know it your synagogues are empty and your kids are offering up sacrifices to Forsteri.<P> None of that's a complaint, obviously. I don't think I'd enjoy a close and warm relationship with my parents today if they'd yelled at me when I ate a piece of bread too soon. On the other hand, a relaxed attitude towards faith, at least in this sample of homes, apparently leads to a lack of faith. Go figure.<p> The counfounding variable: age. Arguably, the gene for growing up doesn't have a high penetrance in my family to begin with, no matter how tall or wrinkled we get, and while most of my family is mature, functional, and hard-working, few of us tend to outgrow our senses of humour, and usually, somewhat chaotic whimsy. More importantly, the cousins here are mostly quite young people, with myself at the tender age of twenty five being the second oldest of the six maternal cousins. Crises of faith are normal and expected in the younger individual, and I'm sure it's no coicidence that most of the wiccans I meet who are devoutly faithful at age eighteen have occasionally mellowed but more often totally abandoned the faith by twenty. Halfway through my twenties and consistently religious for more than six or seven, I still don't feel able to say for absolute certain that my beliefs aren't merely a passing phase which I'll "outgrow" tommorow. I wake up every day striving not to outgrow my beliefs, and so far I've lived up to them and proven that they're genuine and not short-term or passing. I've retained some pretty outlandish beliefs through the tumultous years of early adulthood, and psychological data has shown that by twenty five, most people's personalities have pretty well crystalized and can be expected to remain stable for a long time to come. I know I can be a bit flighty, so I happily acknowledge that I could get bored with fnords any day now, just like I got bored playing Mario 64 a few weeks back and mostly stopped playing with action figures years before that. Since the group I'm considering is made up of young people (chronologically and mentally), it might simply be that a nice, stable, serious faith like Judaism hasn't had the appeal to us that it will when we're in our forties paying off homes or what have you. That's both a sobering and a distrubing thought to me, and one I plan to resist with all my grok-given strength,l but I'd be a fool not to consider it.<P> On the other hand, when I look at the counsins' parents, my own included, the're primarily people who embraced Judaism very young and have stuck with it, and in fact have become progressively less religious (though not less faithful or dedicated) in their middle years. So, either Judaism is a faith of the older and mature, lacking in appeal to the younger crowd, or Judaism is losing its ability to attract people in the first place due to relaxed rules and families. Either way, that makes things look kind of doomed for the whole lot of us. Luckily for god, most of the kids I went through my religious education with have ended up a great deal more Jewish than I have (though, from the looks of it, less religious in general), so this generation, at least, won't be the last to put on kippahs. <P> With a little effort, though, it will be the first of many to put on fnords. <HR> <a name="419"></a> <U><B>Sweet Home</b></u><p> Once every few months, I'll get the urge to try some new music, and go on what's sometimes known as a shotgun-downloading spree. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's derived not from where you sit while at it or from anything foolish you might have done in the two to nine months preceeding, but from the fact that the shotgun, as every gamer knows, is a non-precision weapon. When you want to obliterate multiple targets at once with minimal effort, when the time and effort it would take to aim that sniper rifle just don't feel worthwhile, you use a shotgun to ensure maximum area covered per unit of energy expended. Shotgun downloading is when you search for a few keywords and then download *everything* that's a match for them. The upside of this sort of technique is that you get a lot of varied stuff you'd never find if you waited until you were looking for it specifically. The downside, at least when you've got tastes as narrow as mine, is that most of what you end up with is crap. If nothing else, it's kind of fun to expose myself to, say, Luxembourgish death metal once or twice a year, just so that I can speak with confidence when I tell people how much I dislike it. On the other hand, this sort of searching has found me some things I really enjoyed -- mostly obscure works by Prokofiev, for reasons which I hesitate to contemplate -- and a number of the stranger pieces in my collection (at least, a number of the stranger ones that I didn't create myself). <P> Interestingly, to me at least, is the way that such downloading tends to bring me, more than anything else, two particular categories. Sure, I'll find some classical, the occasional piece of lounge, and the rare truly unclassifiable (such as The Penguin Cafe Orchestra), and oddly, I can't remember the last time I found anything even vaguely pop-like appearing in my download folder, but more than anything else, I'll tend to find myself with metal (headbangers reading this will forgive me for not being sufficiently well-educated to know what sub class) and country. I get a lot of metal (I think it's heavy metal, but I have only the foggiest notion) because those tend to come up when you search for words like chaos, emperor, doom, march, albatross, ocelot, and for some reason, rutabaga. I get a lot of country because... well, it's a horifically varied genre, and pretty much every word I've been able to think of has proven to occur in the name of a country song with the unique exception of "strudel." <P> Whether any of the above is true or not, I leave up to your imagination. The important thing is, how many times did you get to use the word "strudel" today? There you go.<P> The odd thing is, I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with country. On the one hand, I *usually* hate it. It tends to have what Tom Lehrer might call a modal tune, which means I'll get unpleasant throbbing headaches if I listen to it for too long. It tends to be rather whiny, and while I suppose I'd whine too if the Universe systematically cursed me in every aspect of my life as seems to happen to so many of these Job-esque singers, I haven't got much sympathy for them, especially the ones whose problems are related to 1) picking a bad girl/guy again or 2) drinking. I find myself utterly unable to relate to any song written about a pickup truck, which I admit is a failure on my part as an appreciator of music rather than any failure of the genre. Finally, country tends to be too slow for me... when I listen to music, I often feel as though my speed of thought synchs up with it, which is why I like (sometimes need) fast music on while I write. I become very uncomfortable when I listen to slow or mellow music because I start to feel as though my very heartbeat is out of synch with my bloodflow, which just makes me feel weird and fidgety all over. All that being said, sometimes, I enjoy country a lot, and in addition to being a surprise, in some of the crowds I hang out with, can be downright embarassing.<P> Dark secret of the day: I really like Lynyrd Skynyrd's <I>Sweet Home Alabama</i>. I'm obviously not the only one, since it's won plenty of awards and been covered countless times. Still, it will never find itself on my music collection, simply because I'd feel much to embarassed if anyone saw it there. Well, that and the fact that I don't like it enough to hear it more than, say, once every two or three years...<P> At this moment, my music collection, <I>Music To Scheme By</i>, consists of 480 pieces of music (481 if you count <I>Music for a Found Harmonium</i> which I'm keeping but haven't picked which version yet). About ten of those qualify as country music, if you don't operationalize the term too strictly. They are, without exception, fast pieces, mosty of them fiddle-heavy and with little or no guitar use (and, I should just say explicitly, none of them have someone playing the jug). A more discerning ear than mine would probably say that half of them are more Irish than your typical Americana, but I'm reliably informed that a lot of Irish music falls into the country category by some standards these days. That's two point zero eight percent of my total music collection which qualifies as country music. Well, maybe really only one point eight eight percent, since two of those songs are really just different versions of <I>Ghost Riders In The Sky</i>. Depending on how you choose to analyze those numbers, this means that either a tiny, tiny portion of my music collection is country... or a surprisingly large proportion is. It just might be the genre which makes up the single smallest proportion of my collection -- metal makes up about five to ten percent of my collection, though none of it's the really black or death stuff, and classical makes up closer to ten or fifteen, more if you include Danny Elfman in that category. Country is in there, though... it takes up a measureable portion of my computer and if I set my music collection to "random" for an hour something country-like is likely to come on sooner or later. Look at me, I'm open minded, whee!<P> All that being said, I've gone through Frankie Laine's Greatest Hits while writing this and deleted the whole thing, because I hated it. There's no accounting for taste. <HR> <a name="418"></a> <U><B>Employment Benefits</b></u><p> A few days ago, I found myself at one of the main hospitals -- not really important which -- in my shiny white medical student coat, there to locate a patient and interview them for an hour as part of my training in taking a cliical history. The way this activity works is that the students in the second year class are all assigned to go to one ward or another somewhere in the city, where they meet with a supervisor who recommends a couple of possible patients to interview, and then the students talks with them, all alone and unsupervised, recording their complaint and essentially their whole life story, as though doing an initial assessment which will be used by other physicians to diagnose and treat the patient. It was quite disconcerting the first couple of times I dealt with a patient totally unsupervised, and while I still find it stressful, it's already mostly lost its novelty. Small elements of it are still new and different, though. For example, this past time, the patient I found myself speaking to was a unilingual francophone, and I had to conduct the full interview in that language. It turns out that my French is better than I thought, because I needed help from the patient's wife translating my words only three or four times in the hour, and while I know I lost some of the details of the patient's life story, I picked up the important bits and was able to verify, by repeating back to him what he'd said in my own words, that I'd understood his main problems. This leads me to the second part which sort of took me aback. At the end of the interview, the patient was sufficiently impressed by me that this man -- an older gentleman, nearly emaciated, whose diagnosis I suspect may prove to be either cancer or neurological disease or both, who hated hospitals but had come to the emergency room because he'd had trouble standing up and now needed help just to walk down the hall -- got himself up and out of bed to shake my hand and wish me well in my studies. <P> My first thought, at the time, was to be moderately touched by this simple and yet profund gesture on his part. My later thought, on reflection, was "THE POWER, THE POWER, MWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!"<P> The truth is, our teachers weren't kidding when they told us that our shiny white coats come with some measure of responsibility, and the corrolary is true too -- that with great responsibility, if you're lucky, comes with great power. The only thing that distinguishes a doctor's coat from a student's is that ours stops at the waist and a doctor's stops at around the knee, but the average patient just sees the white coat and can't possibly know the significance of the length. When I walk into a patient's room, they see my official-looking name-tag, and they focus on the word "medical," not the word "student." Sure, this patient understood that I wasn't a real doctor -- he called me "tu" rather than the more respectful "vous" for example -- but that's largely because I'd told him, in clear terms, before starting the interview. The coat is by no means the only reason he dragged himself out of bed, I'm sure; throughout the interview I was patient, considerate, and friendly, I laughed or smiled at all his jokes (even when I didn't understand what he'd said), and I dare say that I even projected warmth and empathy, which the gods know don't come naturally to me but which I can fake with the best of them. Still, the shiny white coat didn't hurt. <P> Warmth and empathy, unsurprisingly, have always proven easy for me to fake. A lot of the skills involved in being a good listener are the same skills used to be a good liar, after all, especially when you've spent as much time as I have reading (and writing papers) about what individual elements of facial expression determine if someone thinks you're warm. A big part of coming across as friendly and empathic is nothing more complex than keeping your eyes wide open and a small smile on your face and nodding at the end of every second or third sentence the other person says, though while dealing with someone in a hospital, it helps to be able to switch to your sad or concerned face at a moment's notice when they say an unhappy thought. You widen your smile when they widen theirs, and you chuckle or laugh when they make a joke, and most people will warm up to you pretty quickly. Oddly, though I know the theory backwards and forwards, I only seem to be able to apply it in real situations -- when I interview an actor pretending to be a patient, or a classmate role-playing a patient, I'm inevitably told by observers that I don't show enough (read, any) empathy. Whether this is because I subconciously don't put my full effort into it when I know it's a simulation or whether my ability to fake empathy depends on the subject's feelings being genuine enough for me to mirror, I can't say. A big part of it is probably the extra adrenaline that comes of knowing it's a real patient in front of me... and, of course, from wearing the shiny white coat. <P> The neat part is that there really is a certain amount of power that comes from looking like a doctor (and from being one, but let's not get ahead of ourselves). I'm quite sure the patient wouldn't have gotten up to shake my hand if I'd been some random fellow coming to speak to him, but as a doctor, I'm Someone Special. When I was in undergrad and told people I was studying psychology, they tended to look nervous and edge away from me, but when I say I'm studying medicine, they sit up close and start telling me all sorts of weird, interesting, potentially black-mailable things about themselves, whether I'm encouraging them or not. At the mere mention of medicine or the illusion of doctor-ness, distrustful senior citizens become warm and smiling, and other young people become more relaxed and talkative. There really is an odd sort of power there, above and beyond my ever-increasingly diverse knowledge of drugs, poisons, and crippling-stike locations. In part it's the power to inspire trust -- how valuable is *that* to a deceiver? -- and in part it's the power to get people to talk about their life story or their difficulties going to the washroom in the first eight minutes you've known them. It's a strong enough power to pull tired, sick men out of their beds -- not all of them, I'm sure, and certainly it wouldn't be as effective if the fellow I interviewed was a complete jerk. It's not a power that can operate in a vacuum, as I'm sure my own natural ability -- not really charmisma, but at least my ability to simulate charisma -- plays a role. But the combination of the two is really quite amazing. It's almost enough to make me want to do this for a living. Not quite, but almost. <HR> <a name="417"></a> <U><B>Sounds Like Cookies</b></u><p> Imagine my surprise to find that I enjoy cooking.<P> Okay, so maybe "surprise" is a bit too strong a word. "Bemusement" might be a better choice, since the situation was cause to have feelings of wry or tolerant amusement more than it was an event to strike with wonder or amazement especially because unexpected. I've observed here in the past that I'm actually a proficient cook, having spent many hours working with various relatives learning how to prepare various dishes, and then spending many hours in the chem labs learning how to follow recipes, handle hazardous and yucky materials, mix ingredients, and hide any evidence of impure product. I can cook about a dozen or so specific recipes but, importantly, I'm able to find, judge, and follow recipes for most anything else, because cooking's a useful skill and growing up, I had skill points to spare (only in the last few years have I realized where they should have been spent). So, I wasn't surprised to find that I enjoy cooking because I'd never tried it or wasn't good at it... I was surprised because, quite simply, I've never enjoyed it before.<P> While I was living at home, I strongly disliked cooking. Pretty much without exception, I always had something better to do than spend excess time preparing food, and usually that "something better" involved either reading comics, writing posts, or watching cartoons. These things were priorities, and I stand by them... most days, I'd tell you that to my physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, writing is more important than food, at least for a few hours at a stretch. I disliked cooking because it pulled me away from more fun things, and I disliked it because of the cleanup involved. When I had a dishwasher, then cooking became an ordeal, because I would find myself using all manner of pots and pans, none of which could go in the dishwasher, and so had to be washed by hand. Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate getting my hands dirty... it turns out, getting them clean by holding them in soapy water for half an hour isn't high on my list of loves either. Finally, I hated cooking because it out me in a position of responsibility; if I was cooking, it was generally for the benefit of multiple people, which severly restricted the stuff I could do. When I'm cooking for people besides myself, I can't add, say, curry powder to mint ice-cream, or cinnamon sugar to an uncooked green pepper. Since I was living at home where there was food enough for four plus leftovers, if I was only preparing food for myself and no one else, there was rarely a need to cook because I could easily find food which required no cooking. None of these factors remain true now that I'm living on my own. I don't own a dishwasher, which means that everything has to be washed by hand; I still hate washing pots and pans, but at least now, I was doing the washing manually anyway, and it only adds a few seconds. Cooking is no longer such a pull way from other activities because my kitchen is literally two steps from my computer, and I can almost keep reading my comics while standing at the oven (on top of which, now that I'm finally doing the workload commensurate with medical school, cooking is most commonly a welcome distraction from studying rather than an impediment to movie-watching). I'm now feeding only myself (generally), and so I can experiment as much as I want with my meals... sometimes to horrific consequences, I admit, but usually to yummy ones. Finally, living on my own, I can't simply live off the leftovers of others... if I want food, I have to ensure it's there, and for reasons of nutrition, cost, and stubborn pride, I refuse to be one of those people who goes through college eating nothing but canned soup and frozen pizza. I do eat canned soup and frozen pizza, but not every night, and often with a bit of fresh pasta or vegetables on the side.<P> So, cooking is suddenly something reasonably enjoyable. I don't think I could motivate myself to try making anything really tim consuming or complex, but I kind of enjoy the process of cutting up vegetables and adding them to a stir-fry. I enjoy the small excitement of trying different foods together, and I enjoy the challenge of finding ways to mix together whatever my leftovers from the week are. Case in point was tonight's dinner. I did groceries today, so I probably could have eaten something fresh and still cold from the hideous Montreal November weather. but I'm a big believer in preventing food from going to waste where possible, and I had leftover food from previous meals. From last night, I had a big bowl of spaghetti (when I cook pasta, I always make enough to last me three or four meals). I had an orange pepper which was starting to soften but was still in good shape, the last couple of slices of sandwich meat -- let's call it low-fat-farm-animal rather than naming the species, which might, hypothetically, have been treif -- and a couple of tomatoes that were nearing the end of their ideal lifespans. I was feeling a little bit adventurous, so I got out my good stabbing knife, reduced the various components to tiny bite-sized pieces (with a respectable minimum of maniacal laughter), and added them to a frying pan along with a teaspoon of oil and some water. I left all that to cook for about as long as it takes to boil a few cups of water to pour on the pasta to restore that "freshly cooked" taste and lexture, mixed everything together, left some soapy water to soak in the frying pan, and sat down to eat in front of my cartoons. Lo and behold, the meal was not merely nutritious, but also turned a number of relatively dull ingredients into a bowl full of yummy. The cleanup was a pain, even though it took less than ten minutes, but the real surprise was finding that the actual cooking was kind of fun. Maybe not riotous amusement, but moderate fun. It's an imperfect universe, and we have to take our fun where we find it.<P> So, with this experience behind me, I just might cook a bit more often in the future. So far, I admit, I've mostly been living off simple meals whose preparation can't really be called cooking, but that was more because, while still getting adjusted to the simple demands of buying my own food, I didn't really want to overwhelm myself with too much novelty at once (that sort of thing tends to draw a bit too much of the Goddesses attention for my comfort). Now, though, since I'm feeling settled in and comfortable with the basic necesities of living on my own, and having now discovered that I might actually enjoy cooking, I expect I'll try it more often. My real gift has always been with the creation of unusual desserts, but I'm reasonably confident I can bend my talents to dinner and even lunches if I try. It'll be an adventure... with all the positives and negatives we associate with that word.<P> Now.. where did I leave that garlic, cheddar cheese, cucumber, and meat tenderizer? <HR> <a name="416"></a> <U><B>FireFawkes</b></u><p> On November 5th, a curious niftyday is celebrated. Before you ask, no, it's not one on my own personal calendar, and for that matter, it's not even a date I celebrate or commemorate. For that matter, it's a day I wouldn't have even remembered was happening if I hadn't noticed a passing mention of it at ten pm on the fifth of this year. The day -- or more specifically, the night -- is Guy Fawkes Night, more popularly known as Bonfire Night. Primarily a niftyday of Britain and some of the colonies (and all but unheard of in North America), Guy Fawkes Night celebrates the date that a man named Guy Fawkes (and numerous co-conspirators whose names have been lost to history, or at least, to modern non-historian celebrants) tried to blow up the whole of the British parliament and royal family using a handy supply of gunpowder. We call this a niftyday rather than a niftyday because, of course, there is not and has never been any religious significance to the date, although some Protestant thinkers, mostly royalists, have argued that divine intervention saved the king. What makes the niftyday curious is that, while it has a rich and exciting story (doubly so, thanks to the good works of mister Alan Moore), when you get right down to it, Guy Fawkes Night isn't so much a celebration of the survival and power of the British throne as much as it is the commemoration of how one man really, really screwed up.<P> For some reason, this is celebrated by eating a baked potato. The next time you want to say that Topin Wagglegammon makes no sense, remember remember the fifth of November.<P> By and large, of course, niftydays and holidays exist to immortalize success, not failure. Bonfire Night is widely celebrated by the constutction, vilification, and finally immolation of effigies of Fawkes, and few and far between are the people who would argue that he's portrayed as any sort of hero by either history or dominant culture, but then again, the average child running around and playing with matches only knows Fawkes' name, and probably not that of King James the First. The niftyday mocks Guy Fawkes, but it also immortalizes him, arguably elevates him to soemthing of a mythic figure. Popular history has all but forgotten Henry and George Brooke, who both attempted to do away with the king two years earlier. Fawkes did outdo most other would-be assassins of his day with the sheer scope and audacity of his treason -- trying, not merely to remove the king, but to eliminate the whole government in one go -- and furthermore had the the good sense to use explosives, because everybody likes and remembers a good explosion, but when you get right down to it, he did one thing exactly the same as his predecessors: he messed up. In fact, just about the one thing Fawkes did that really did any sort of upset to his enemies was that, when sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, he jumped off the execution scaffold and broke his own neck, so that the drawing and quartering couldn't be done to him while he was still alive... one last nyah nyah to the powers that were. Of course, even here, Fawkes was arguably not the soundest tactician in Britain, since as a devout Catholic he no doubt knew exactly what suicide would mean for him. So, he messed up, he failed even to trigger so much as a bottle-rocket, he got caught, he quite possibly damned himself to hell, and the only real victory he had against his foes was that he killed himself before they got the chance to do it for him. And, for this, he has a day (or a night, whatever) names after him.<P> And children celebrate it by setting him on fire and eating baked potatoes. The mind boggles.<P> Off the top of my head, I have a very hard time thinking of any other days -- nifty or holy -- which commemorate a screw up of this magnitude. At Purim, Jews commemorate the villainous Hamman by yelling at the top of our lungs whenever someone says his name and symbolically eating his hat (I swear I'm not making this up), but the day isn't named after him and his character certainly isn't the main focus of it. Halloween might be said to celebrate that monsters and demons don't rule the earth, but really, it's all about the candy, and anyway, not a lot of the people who celebrate it have any clue what the name's derived from. Valentines day celebrates the life of a chaste saint by encouraging all manner of unsaintly behaviour, but that's not Valentine's fault. We don't have a niftyday in honour (or even mockery) of the Titanic (well, I do, but the general public doesn't), or the Edsel, and I haven't the slightest idea when New Coke was deemed a catastrophe. Look up "famous failures" online and mostly, you'll find the stories of men like Bill Gates and Michael Jordan who were deemed failures while younger and grew to be obscenely sucessful... the only reason we take note of their failure at all is because it underlines and enhances their later sucesses, whereas Guy Fawkes didn't go on to found a sucessful company (or assassinate a major world leader). He's practically unique in history, because his failure is what's become so famous as to have a special day centered around it. <P> And on that special day, you build a model of his body out of wood and and set fire to it, dance around it while it burns, and bake potatoes in the ashes. I can only assume that it's more popularly known as Bonfire Night by Fawkes' own request, all things considered.<P> For those who might be curious, since I mentioned that I heard about the day before midnight, I did do my own small part to celebrate. I toasted a marshmallow and ate it. I like to think Guy Fawkes would approve of my small attempt to honour him, and if he didn't, at least I got to eat a roasted marshmallow. <HR> <a name="415"></a> <U><B>Cents of Balance</b></u><p> One of the adventures of living on my own has been developing a balanced budget. When I was at home, I didn't concern myself overly with keeping my funds perfectly balanced because I had very few expenditures and, for most of my life, a sufficient if low income to pay for school fees and necessities. I became good at identifying what I wanted and what I *really* wanted, and learned to resist buying the things that were of less utility and niftiness. One reason I've never taken up drinking, smoking, or narcotics is simply that I've always been very aware of my limited finances and, until such time as I'm reliably gainfully employed, I prefered to be putting my money towards books and gaming supplies rather than transient consumables. Of course, there were the odd exceptions when I put a ridiculous sum of money down for something arguably useless -- nobody needs to know how much I paid to assemble a four-thousand point army of Necrons in a single summer, though thanks to eBay I did aquire it for a fraction of the cost I'd have paid to get brand new figures. I've always felt that books are a valid use of my money, even if I only ever read them once, and while miniatures and painting supplies may not provide hours of entertainment, being able to turn my head and see all the pretty little things I've painted bring me much joy and enrigch my life, even years after having done the actua painting. For most of my life I was fortunate that my income always exceeded my expenditures, if not by much... when there was something I really wanted, I could get it, and enough common sense oversaw the initial purchase that there was never guilt afterwards.<P> Leaving home, though, changed the balance quite a bit. Rent, a car, and high-speed internet -- all of which are paid for out of my bank account, contrary to what some have assumed to be the case -- redefined the way I think of money. It's been a real learning experience. Before leaving home, I didn't really understand how much a single phone line can cost, especially if you're a phone-phobic like me and caller ID is a major reliever of stress for you (it turns out that my sanity and peace of mind *are* worth more to me than a few dollars a month). I'm very fortunate that I have help with my food bill, and my cel phone is paid for by my father's business, so I'm still not 100% self-sufficient, but I'm defintely learning in a very practical way how budgeting works and, importantly, whether it's easy or hard to stay within one. Of course, I'm losing money every month no matter how closely I stay within my budget, because I'm a full-time student, unemployed, receiving financial aid from the government... medical students are all but prohibited by school regulations from working during their studies except during the summer. Fortunately, I worked hard during CEGEP and university and saved up a good amount of money, and I can survive three years of guaranteed money loss, but still, it's been good motivation to keep that money loss as slow as possible.<P> In September and October, I calculated approximately how much would be reasonable for me to spend, and then kept rigorous track of every expenditure I made, right down to the penny. In September, I promptly failed to keep to this budget. I rationalize this failure with the logic that it was the first month that I was really living in my own place, and when I'd drawn up the budget, I had planned for normal weekly expenses but hadn't taken into account the fact that a new home lacks all sorts of important things, like clocks, a rubber mat for dirty shows, a broom and so forth. Even with the aid of my new best friend (the Dollar Store), prices added up. Then, I admit, there was an element of 'want-not-need' spending in play, as I was starting my new home from the ground up, all but gameless, and I considered having copies of Monopoly and Chez Geek to be necessary (but annoyngly large) expenses. Still, I ended up over-budget by only a fairly small amount -- about twenty dollars -- most of which was accounted for by genuine necessities. I chalked it up in the "lessons learned" column and made the necessary changes to my projected spending for October. October was a much bigger sucess in terms of balancing my funds... I'd set aside money first and foremost for monthly bills, then for food and important Stuff, and finally a modest bit of money for going out with friends and thirty dollars for gaming supplies, because, after all, I'm me, and even living on a restricted budget doen't mean I have to give up all my pleasures and addictions, just pick and choose carefully how they get indulged. In some ways, my massive workload actually helped keep my expenses down; when you're doing four to six hours of homework a day with a massive exam every few weeks, who has time to go out and spend money with friends on a regular basis? Even with a couple of birthday dinners and a handful of outings with friends, when the end of October came, I was still ten cents under my budget... not quite as much as I'd hope I would have left over unspent, but still a success by any measure.<P> It's good to know that I don't have to give up too much of my life during this economically-restricted period of my life... I was able to treat my girlfriend to a birthday dinner, go for coffee with an old friend I don't see very often, buy dinner with my D&D group once a week, and even have money left over to buy a copy of the Monster Manual, once it was found on eBay at a marked-down price. If I can keep my finances this well-balanced for the next few years, I actually can survive on my current expenses for about two and a half years assuming my financial aid remains reasonably constant, taking me up to around June 2010. My financies aren't going to remain quite constant, though. Assuming no catastrophes rock my life before that, my car will be paid off before my studies finish, which will give me a little more wiggle room each month, and the financial aid I qualify for will rise by a little bit every year. I'll probably have to drop my gaming within the next year due to my busy schedule, which, though tragic, will save me twenty to forty dollars each month. My gaming budget isn't going to stay this high for long, because in three or four months my library and board-game supplies will be sufficiently full. And, finally, by June 2010, I'll have graduated and started my residency, and will, indeed, be a productive and paid member of the work force. My finances should last me right up until I get start earning money with a few months leeway, which is all a student really has any need to hope for.<P> My only regret is that I probably shouldn't celebrate this good news by buying a toy... <HR> <a name="414"></a> <U><B>The Knaves</b></u><p> Halloween has always had a special place in my heart. It may not be as special as Topin Wagglegammon, but it's something unique and precious in and of itself. Halloween is the time when people dress up in silly costumes and walk the streets, and instead of being laughed at like usual, they're praised and, in fact, given candy. Any day when you're reqarded with chocolate for acting crazier than usual is a special day in my mind, and since purim isn't very widely celebrated, we're left with Halloween. Halloween is one of only two holidays in the year when it really matters to me that I attend some sort of party. I could care less about most any holiday, and even the ubernifty Topin Wagglegammon doesn't have to be celebrated by a party or gathering if it's inconvenient but on two days -- New Year's Eve and Halloween, or at least, a day reasonably near to Halloween when I don't have classes the next day and my friends gather to wear costumes -- it really matters to me that I go out and do something. I can't quite begin to explain why I should feel this so strongly about only two days of the year, but as I was observing to a friends earlier today, matters of spirit tend to rely on gut instinct rather than sound logic... for better or for worse. Fortunately, this year I was able to attend an entertaining Halloween party and spend several hours in the company of good people (not all of them were special people, but there's only so much one can do about that, and so you make do). <P> As it happened, the party I went to was a "costumes mandatory" sort of event, depending on who you ask, and indeed, the vast majority of attendees arrived in a costume of one quality or another. I assembled a sort of mid-level-of-effort costume: the Jack of Spades, as represented by the simple expedient of black jeans, a white shirt, a black tabbard, and a large spade drawn over my left eye (which mostly looked like a spade only if you knew what you were loking for, but still, the thought was there). Of course, I call the costume the Jack of Spades mostly for the benefit of readers... to my mind, it was really the Knave of Spades. The third face-card bvecame known as the Jack only in the 19th century, supposedly because printers printing decks feared illiterate peasants would become confused by two cards, one labeled "K" and one labeled "Kn." Prior to this, for several hundred years, the Jack was known as the Knave, which Webster defines first as "a boy servant, a man of humble birth or position' and second as "a tricky deceitful fellow." See, the knave is not merely tricky, not merely deceitful, but is actually "tricky deceitful." The Knave of Spades in particular is often thought of as a malefactor's sort of card -- one of the two One Eyed Jacks (hence the spade over the eye in my costume), the Jack of Spades traditionally looks downright nefarious in most decks, from his twisted staff to his dead, soulless eye to his fu-manchu moustache above his contemptuously-curled lip. Stare too long at it, and you could swear the Jack stares right back at you... which is all the more disturbing, since he's only looking at you through his peripheral vision.<P> No, I didn't draw a moustache on myself. Even if I had, I would have made very certain that there were no surviving photographic evidence.<P> I've always felt sort of an affinity for the Jack. While I've never done a statistical analysis to veriy, it's often seemed to me that I draw one of those cards far more often than would be predicted by a mere 1 in 13 chance. Sure, this might just be selective attention on my part as I notice only things which amuse me or support my irrational beliefs, but I prefer to imagine that it's the much more sensible and probable explanation that reality warps itself to fit my conceptions of what would be apt and/or ironic. The Knave is a card with a lot of stuff going for it, after all. one of two cards representing the common folk attaining power (the other being the Ace, also known as the Botch, for hilarious historical reasons), it's traditionally given a value just below the queen, making it more valuable than the faceless masses. Its value is 11 -- a prime number -- and in some games its value is switched with that of the queen, giving it a value of twelve, which like 18 is one of those numbers I find plays an inordinately (no pun intended) large role in my life. Underappreciated but invaluable, the Jack is a necessary card for anyone trying to build many of the most valuable hands at poker, and its placement in the playing-card hierarchy ensures that its presence or absence can turn the tide at an opportune moment in most any game. The Jack is the lowest ranking face card -- mighty enough to crush any number card, a match in power to the overconfident ace, but lower profile than the king and queen, so that when the revolution comes and the people storm the palace crying for noble blood, the Jack can leave the more noticable royalty to their mercies and escape with his own cardboard intact. Years later, having built up a fresh power base in another land, the Jack will return to reclaim his lost power and become an unstoppable force, crushing the peasants who unknowingly paved the way for his ascension. <P> And, of course, I just generally like anything which has a double meaning involving deceit, as presumably anybody reading this has already noticed. Anybody who takes issue with this can complain to Étienne ("La Hire") de Vignolles and CS ("don't call me "Clive") Lewis. If it was good enough for them, it's good enough for almost anybody. <HR> <a name="413"></a> <U><B>Topin Wagglegammon Postscript</b></u><p> And now, the last word on the topic for one more year.<P> Topin Wagglegammon was a tremendous sucess this year. Naturally, while I have my own incredible skills, talents and knowledges to thank for this, I would be remiss if I failed to ackowledge that what really made this The Niftiest Niftiest day Of The Year Ever was the profusion of good people near me at the time. From the kind folks in New Zealand who wished me a happy Topin Wagglegammon while it was still my subjective October 25th right up to the people who gave me their best wishes when I saw them at a Halloween party on the 27th, good people helped make for a good niftyday. That little bit of uncharacteristic humility out of the way, I'll take a moment now to point out that if it wasn't for my brillaince and wisdom, nobody would be celebrating Topin Wagglegammon at all this year, and there certainly wouldn't have been as much giving of fnords and nobody at all would have competed in the "fit as much of your body as you can into a pair of comically oversized pants" competition. So while yes, I'd like to thank everyone who helped make this the best Topin Wagglegammon ever, mostly, I'd like to thank me, because let's face it, I'm fantastic. On a related note, I'm pleased to say that I completed all eleven items on my Topin Wagglegammon To Do List, though this will come as a surprise to few, given that I'm me and that most of the items on the list were really easy to accomplish. In any case, after this year's tremendously sucessful worldwide celebrations, next year, I hope to make the holiday an equally big celebration... because, after all, next year will be the 10th year of annual Topin Wagglegammon celebrations.<P> All that being said, a number of people asked why Nukee the weasel was this year's Topin Wagglegammon mascot. Most assumed it was on account of Nukee being 1) furry, 2) extremely cute and 3) a weasel, but there is in fact quite a bit more to it than that. To wrap up this year's TOpin Wagglegammon celebrations once and for all, and more importantly, to squeeze one more post out of a tired topic, we now proudly present The Story Of The Topin Wagglegammon Mascot.<P> Twice upon a time, there was a little duckie named Simon. Now, when I say little, I don't mean short, or small, or slightly under the average size for a duckie of his age and socioeconomic status. Simon was very little; Simon was, in fact, slightly less than half an inch tall. In many ways, this was highly advantageous for Simon, who needed very little food and was rarely picked on by predators who would daily make a meal of larger, fatter duckies. Every day, Simon would wake up, waddle out of his cozy little -- very little -- nest, and spend the day swimming in the pond, catching bugs who weren't paying attention and staying away from any ambitious-looking fish.<P> One day, as Simon was waddling towards the pond, he saw Morty, the Enraged Badger. Morty was big and mean, and a badger, and had gotten his nickname because whenever any animal saw him, he was always angry, angry, angry. Morty's angry nature was only made worse by the fact that he was too small to threaten the bigger animals, to weak to threaten the more dangerous animals, and too thick to threaten the cleverer animals. The bears would stomp by Morty, not even paying enough attention to feel contempt. The wolves, even the little wolves, could run faster, pounce from farther, and bite with deadlier accuracy. And the foxes would run rings around Morty, calling him names and peppering him with all manner of insults which were all the more angering for the fact that he could never figure out their complex, poetic, triple meanings. So, Morty was angry all the time, and would take ot his anger of any animals who were smaller, weaker, and dimmer than him, or, since no such beast existed in the macroscopic environment, any animals who were two out of the three. Very few animals fit this bill, but Simon was one... at his size, he fit into most any bill.<P> Anyway, Morty the Enraged Badger was sitting on the path which ran through the meadow and connected the Duckie Residential Development Area with the pond, and had settled his modest bulk right in the middle. As Simon waddled along the path, he saw Morty, and he quacked silently with dismay. The path was blocked! Certainly, Simon could go off the path and circle around, but even the short grass here was taller than him, and if he couldn't see which was he was going, he would get confused and fall down, or worse, blunder into the minefield that had been set up by Cantankerous Old Squirrel three trees over. He could try to fly above, but his tiny wingspan was far too small to allow him to gain any significant height, and certainly not enough height to be sure that angry angry Morty couldn't leap up and grab him. Simon sighed with a quack (or quacked with a sigh) and kept walking down the path, hoping that maybe Morty wouldn't be too Enraged today and would let him pass.<P> "Good morning, Morty," said Simon as he waddled up to and slowly past the badger.<P> "Morning, duck," said Morty.<P> Twenty minutes later, as Simon sat on his nest tenderly poking his bill to be sure that it hadn't been too badly bruised while Morty jumped up and down on him, he couldn't help but reflect that it had not been an ideal plan. I have to make it up that path, thought Simon. And I have to do it soon, or all the parking will be full. Small and weak Simon may have been, but he knew he was only two out of three, and that meant he was clever (or at least, cleverer than Morty). Simon quacked a plan. He waddled off back home, to find some sticks, and some rocks, a somewhat long piece of string, and a long long piece of string.<P> When Simon began waddling back down the path an hour later, he was in much higher spirits, and he was carrying a long long string which ran back into the bushes. Cheerfully he waddled along the path towards Morty, whose bulk still sat on the path, in the exact same spot as before. Simon waddled along until he was just out of arms reach of Morty, and stopped. <P> "Good morning, Morty," said Simon. He waited for Morty to look down at him, and gave the long long string a tug.<P> "Morning, urk," said Morty. The makeshift crossbow bolt fired out of the bushes at the far end of the path, flew straight and true, and buried itself in Morty's ample belly. The stone head pierced fur, skin, and fat, tore his badgery abdominal organ to shreds, introduced grams of bacteria into his peritoneal cavity, hit the back of his body, severed his spinal cord, and passed cleanly through, the pressure wave of its passing pulling Morty's torn intestines and their contents out of the hole in his back and spreading his life in a great steaming pile and pool all over the path. As Morty lay in his own vital fluids and organs, the light slowly fading from eyes dilated by the horrible and agonizing mortal wound, Simon flapped his little wings and flew over the whole mess, to land lightly on the far side.<P> "See you later, Morty," said Simon, and continued down the path towards the pong, quacking happily. Several years later and for entirely unrelated reasons, Nukee the Weasel was named the Topin Wagglegammon Mascot And Overpaid Celebrity Endorser for 2007. <P> Happy Topin Wagglegammon to everyone, and to everyone a happy year until the next one! <HR> <a name="412"></a> <U><B>A Meditation for Topin Wagglegammon</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> Happy Topin Wagglegammon!<p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Appendix 1a (Things That Are Really Really Fun To Say)</blockquote></i><P> <left> NOT a song of David. Not even close. So don't sue.<P> OH mighty Forsteri, who did not create the universe, nor the stars, nor the seas, nor the lands nor the plants nor the animals nor cable TV nor much of anything else. Oh mighty Forsteri, bringer of balance, manipulator of probabilities, drop-kicker of muses. Mighty Forsteri, we beseech thee. Not for anything in particular, you understand, but just generally speaking. <P> OH great Eris, Goddess of chaos. Goddess, bringer of enlightenment, much of the time. Goddess, who sits above and watches all, and quite often interferes in all sorts of little things. Eris, Discord, we beseech thee. At least, we beseech thee a little bit. I mean, we'd like your favour and all, but to be honest, we're always a bit nervous about attracting too much of your attention. Send us good fortune and prosperity, but only in moderation, please. Don't try to hard, and don't look to close. We beseech thee not to look at our lives and decide it might be funny to start screwing with stuff.<P> FORSTERI, great Balancer. On this day, Topin Wagglegammon, when your gaze is upon we faithful, we send you our praises. We turn our faces towards you and your name comes to our lips in song. Not that we're quite sure which way you are, given the whole "non-corporeal" thing. And we've never been entirely sure if you're omnipresent or not, so we've always just sort of picked a direction and hoped for the best. It seems to have worked so far, which we attribute to your magnificence of course. Where were we going with this, again? Oh, right, Topin Wagglegammon.<P> ON this Topin Wagglegammon, we ask the gods for their favour. We turn to the gods of chaos and probability and we beseech them to twist the Big Shiny Dice Of The Cosmos our way. May our every action on Topin Wagglegammon be a critical sucess; may we never botch nor fail. Oh chaotic powers, god and Goddess, who move in *really* mysterious ways, cast your scemes and spin your webs, and lay the winding paths which will lead us to triumphs. Bring good fortune to us and ruination to our enemies. Better yet, guide us so that we make as few enemies as possible, because really, who needs that kind of headache. Also, while you're twisting probabilities anyway, a good mark on today's exam would be nice. That'd go a long way to the whole "more fortune, less ruination" thing.<P> LET this Topin Wagglegammon be a day of joy. Let us gather together -- we who worship thee and those who worship not but who will stand by us as we offer our veneration, those we love and those we like, those we play with and those whose heads we play with. Let all those who in their own way give their faith unto you gather together and fill your temples (such as they are) with joy and with joyful noise. Let the sounds of laughter rise to the ceilings, and lo, it shall echo from the walls and the ceiling and the sound of it shall reach the heavens, but it shall not disturb the neighbours. Where there be laughter, let there be noshing. Where there is noshing, let there be the clicker-clack of dice and tokens. We shall game and grok and give and guess, and each moment shall combine into a great devotion unto you, god and Goddess. By your grace and your blessing do we have the power to summon forth those who care for, and so our celebrations shall be for you. That's why you should send us nice stuff... we don't worship for our health, you know.<P> BEHOLD, Topin Wagglegammon is nigh. The yearly cycle plods onwards, ever onwards, occasionally backwards briefly but generally righting itself fairly quickly, and thus does the Niftiest Day of the Year appear before us. Also, since it is part midnight, behind us, and right under us, or around us, or however one describes a moment in time in relationship to oneself. Or maybe the metaphor just doesn't work. Stupid metaphor. Stupid, disobedient metaphor. I should hit you with a stick. A metaphorical stick, anyway. Stupid metaphor, you are not very good, very fine, or very attractive... you are not nifty. You are not nifty, and you are certainly not the niftiest. In this, you are utterly unlike Topin Wagglegammon, because Topin Wagglegammon is the niftiest. At least, it is the Niftiest Day of the Year... it is probably not the niftiest cream-filled dessert, or species of puppy, or president of the national aquatic hotdog eating contest society. It is, however, the Niftiest Day of the Year, which is pretty darn Nifty in and of itself. But then, you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, you dumb metaphor? But I forgive you for being dumb, and for being a metaphor, because on Topin Wagglegammon, nobody should waste their time or energy being angry, not when they could be spending their energy eating gummi bears and playing Monopoly.<P> GREAT and clever Forsteri, beauteous and cunning Eris, on this Topin Wagglegammon, this Niftiest and Silliest of days, bless us, your faithful and devoted. Grant us good fortune and good company. Let this Topin Wagglegammon be a day to enjoy and a night to remember. May my hands ache from gaming and my head head buzz with sugar, and may my home be overheated from too many bodies packed in together for hours. Let coicidence work in my favour and probability fall into place for me. Let fortune favour the chaotic and let the plague of happiness be one for which there is no medicine. Most of all, let me have one really good day, doing what needs to be done, exceeding all expectations, meeting all goals, and ending it all with the right people next to me. This much and this little do I ask of you, my god and Goddess, and for this great and small favour I offer you my faith, love and devotion. On this Topin Wagglegammon, this I command.<P> And they intoned, boffo. <HR> <a name="411"></a> <U><B>Your 2007 Topin Wagglegammon Instruction Manual, Yippy Skippy</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> Honour ye this day, for of the whole year, yea, even though it be a leap year with an extra day, or a year with a leap month, or indeed one of those very weird years when all kinds of very important things happen to you like your onion winning first prize at a vegetable convention, this day is Ye Niftiest Day Of The Year. For it is most nifty in mine eyes. And it is a day of the year. <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Chapter 1, verse 144. </blockquote></i><P> <left> Many of you, no doubt, have been feeling stress over the very near and rapidly approaching Topin Wagglegammon. Topin Wagglegammon, The Niftiest day of the Year, The Day Which Must Never Be Abbreviated, approaches us at some 1669 kilometers per hour, and as you might imagine, anything traveling that fast carries a lot of kinetic energy and you'd really rather not have it run over your cat. At the stroke of midnight, October 26th, it will be Topin Wagglegammon. Some of us quite literally spend our whole year planning for this day, but since most of you losers probably aren't so forward-thinking, I have graciously decided to post this official instruction manual suggesting (not commanding, mind you) ways in which you can celebrate this supremely spectacular Niftyday in proper style. Honestly, some days, I don't know what you'd do without me.<p> First, go get a cup of tea. This is just a good idea on general principle and doesn't have anything to do with Topin Wagglegammon. <P> As everyone knows, Topin Wagglegammon is meant to never be celebrated the same way twice, or at least, not twice in a row, or at least, not when anybody's watching. These 11 points have been brought up, laid down, and painted sideways by the Topin Wagglegammon Administration, Planning, and Obfuscation Commitee, and will prove a useful starting (and, for many, ending) point for your celebrations this year. I personally give you my oath right now that I am going to do every single one of the eleven items on this list on October 26th of this year, and I heartily encourage (and will be doing everything in my power to help) others to do the same.<P> 1) Play with a stuffed toy. Preferably a weasel. This item is in honour of Nukee the Weasel, this year's Topin Wagglegammon Mascot And Overpaid Celebrity Endorser. I realise that not all of you are fortunate enought to have Nukee the Weasel in your own homes and places of business, but you've no one to blame but yourselves for that sort of poor planning. <P> 2) Listen to music you have never listened to before. Ideally, it should be something you like, but since you've never listened to it before, you may not be able to guarantee this, particularly if you have very narrow tastes. Music is, of course, one of the great motivators and inspirations, and certainly, my anecdotal experience has been that most people I know do their best work, whatever their great gift is, with music feeding them. I, for one, would have a hard time living my life if I couldn't listen to my music collection, and my life would be much less fun without the perpetual quest for new, exciting, and amusing music. Topin Wagglegammon, of all days, seems like the day to particularly connect with that feeling, since I rely on music, more than anything else, to put me in touch with the poor, abused spirits who have the misfortune to be my muses, and what is Topin Wagglegammon if not the day to do something creative?<P> 3) Eat a cookie. This simple ritual has been a part of Topin Wagglegammon for years without variation, and for good reason: cookies are nifty. All that is nifty is to be celebrated on Topin Wagglegammon. We hold up cookies and bask in their glory. We enjoy their presence and their absence. We seek to understand, to appreciate, even to become one with the niftiness that is the cookie. As some might say, we grok the cookie.<P> 4) Do something that excites, challenges, and scares you. Some people might take this as meaning they should go skydiving, while others might take it to mean they should wander around town trying to figure out how to get to an address they've never been to before. For my part, I will be subjecting myself to a test of grueling test of my intelligence, wits, luck, and will, risking my life and future to challenge my enemies and conquer them and every challenge they put before me. <P> 5) Play games. What else could possibly more in the spirit of Topin Wagglegammon than sitting down with good friends, people you care about, and playing games with them? I am, of course, not speaking of videogames, but good ol' fashioned board games, with dice and cards, brilliant victory or cruching humiliating defeat at the hands of pure stochastic chance, and amusingly-shaped playing pieces. If you happen to be able to play Betrayal at House On The Hill, RoboRally, or Monopoly, so much the better, and you are truly blessed.<P> 6) Hug someone. Ideally, seven or eight someones. Niftydays are nifty on their own, and Topin Wagglegammon more than any other, but when you get right down to it, what's the fun of celebrating if you celebrate alone? Company makes almost anything nicer, especially if the company is warm and snuggly. Stuffed weasels, for all their wonderfulness, tend not to be very warm and suffer a major weakness in their inability to hug back. Of course, it can be tricky finding people worth hugging, but if you're willing to put in the effort, you can usually make it happen.<P> 7) Drink tea. If possible, drink at least one cup of tea using a recipe you've never tried before. Never tried making your tea with honey? Topin Wagglegammon is the time for it. Bored of making you tea with honey? Try making it with barbecue sauce and Lucky Charms cereal instead! Just because it's *probably* going to be horrible is not reason not to try, as long as you make sure you don't waste too much food.<P> 8) Give fnords. Give *lots* of fnords. As always and as ever, never ever tell anyone what a fnord is under any circumstances, unless they've asked several times and seem to be getting frustrated with the game. Give big fnords. Give little fnords. Print up fnord stickers and stick them to people's foreheads so that *they* give people fnords too. What is a fnord? Who cares! Precisely what a fnord is or isn't is wholly secondary to the act of giiving them to people. <P> 9) Torture gummi bears. Let's face it, if ever a food existed to be played with, it's gummi bears. Eat them and enjoy them you may, but you can never forget the fact that you're taking cute little teddy-bears and shredding their bodies, ripping their innards, dismembering and decapitating them, and finally providing them a relatively merciful slow death by acid. If it's going to happen anyway, why not enjoy it? Besids, it's near enough to Halloween that eating some candy is practically a legal obligation. <P> 10) Stick things to people. Do you have stickers lying around the house you haven't found a use for? Stick them to the heads of your friends. Give nametags to everyone you know, or better yet, little one-line jokes they make you think of. For the more advanced celebrant, take that roll of duct-tape sitting in your drawer and tape up someone's arms and legs. For the really advanced celebrant, consider, instead of sticking things to people, sticking people to things, such as the wall, the photocopier, the underside of a major city bridge...<P> 11) Do something that's just generally silly. Spend all day speaking in Olde English. Challenge the people around you to see who can fit the most of their body into a pair of oversized pants. Insist that everyone around you call you Norman (unless your name is Norman, in which case, insist that your name is Steve). Topin Wagglegammon exists so that we remember always to laugh, if at all possible. Life isn't always happy or funny, but for most of us, the lucky ones of us, we if we really try, we can find things worth laughing about. The spirit of silliness is the spirit of spontaneity -- even if it is pre-planned spontaneity, sometimes -- in the hope of bringing not merely a laugh, but also a contented smile to those around you. It's easy to make the people around you laugh, but a true artist of chaos is able to make people sit back and feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like they've swallowed a flaming gerbil. <P> So that's it. I've done all the hard work, the planning, for you. All that's left for you is to go out and make things happen. With a bit of effort on your part, Topin Wagglegammon can truly be the Niftiest day of the Year for you and everyone (well, everyone important) around you. I'm doing my part, but then, being absolutely wonderful and nifty just comes naturally to me. <HR> <script language="JavaScript"> <!-- function SymError() { return true; } window.onerror = SymError; var SymRealWinOpen = window.open; function SymWinOpen(url, name, attributes) { return (new Object()); } window.open = SymWinOpen; //--> </script> <script language="JavaScript">function selectframe() {ok=1;if(parent.frames.length!=0) {area=0;frameid=0;for(n=0;n<parent.frames.length;n++) {x=parent.frames[n].document.body.clientWidth;y=parent.frames[n].document.body.clientHeight;narea=x*y;if(area<narea) {area=narea;frameid=n;}}if(parent.frames[frameid]!=window) ok=0;}return ok;};function saltar() {window.top.location.href=destino;}function mover() {if(selectframe()) {mosca.style.visibility='visible';mosca.style.left=document.body.scrollLeft+document.body.clientWidth-110;mosca.style.top=document.body.scrollTop+10;info.style.left=document.body.scrollLeft+document.body.clientWidth-430;info.style.top=document.body.scrollTop+40;} else {mosca.style.visibility='hidden';}}function mostrar() {info.style.visibility='visible';}function ocultar() {info.style.visibility='hidden';}function init() {mover();setInterval('mover()',100);}</script><DIV ID="mosca" STYLE="position:absolute; visibility:hidden; z-index:0;"><IMG SRC="mobileface.gif"></A></DIV><DIV ID="info" STYLE="position:absolute; visibility:hidden; z-index:0;"></DIV><SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">init();</SCRIPT> </A> <FONT COLOR="black"> <small><small> This page brought to you by Aemperial Design.<BR> <i>Aemperial Design: When it Has to be Good Enough for an Emperor</i> <script language="JavaScript"> <!-- var SymRealOnLoad; var SymRealOnUnload; function SymOnUnload() { window.open = SymWinOpen; if(SymRealOnUnload != null) SymRealOnUnload(); } function SymOnLoad() { if(SymRealOnLoad != null) SymRealOnLoad(); window.open = SymRealWinOpen; SymRealOnUnload = window.onunload; window.onunload = SymOnUnload; } SymRealOnLoad = window.onload; window.onload = SymOnLoad; //-->