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 431-440<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/401-500/441-450.html">Entries 441-450</a><BR> <a href="#440">Entry 440</a> January 18 2008<br> <a href="#439">Entry 439</a> January 15 2008<br> <a href="#438">Entry 438</a> January 12 2008<br> <a href="#437">Entry 437</a> January 9 2008<br> <a href="#436">Entry 436</a> January 6 2008<br> <a href="#435">Entry 435</a> January 3 2008<br> <a href="#434">Entry 434</a> December 31 2007<br> <a href="#433">Entry 433</a> December 28 2007<br> <a href="#432">Entry 432</a> December 25 2007<br> <a href="#431">Entry 431</a> December 22 2007<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/421-430.html">Entries 421-430</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="440"></a> <U><B>Black Tie and Hang Glider</b></u><p> Every so often, we all have our Calvinesque moments. This afternoon, for example, while mentally reviewing everything I know about how to differentiate an abdominal aneurysm, appendicitis, esophagel varices, and pancreatic cancer on the basis of how and where it hurts and how they react when you poke them in the tummy, I realised that I'd been wearing my t-shirt backwards for the last twelve hours. It is the Goddess' blessing that we can be at once, so incredibly brilliant and amazing, and so incredibly oblivious.<P> Which has nothing at all to do with any of what follows. So anyway...<P> In a couple of weeks, I'll be doing something unprecedented: I'll be attending a medical school party, a fancy shindig called Inter Nos. In two and a half years of attendence, I've never done such a thing before, nor even been tempted. This event is particularly out of character for me because it's going to be a classy cocktails-and-dinner event at the local Hilton hotel... not my normal scene, doubly so since the two main (and perhaps only) things to do there will be dance or partake of the open bar. The dress code for the event hasn't been specified, but reading between the lines of the invite (and the associated Facebook group, the existence of which makes me feel oddly and irrationally nauseous) suggests that the event's organizers dream of it being a black-tie-and-handkerchief sort of evening but aren't making it mandatory because some people can't afford tuxes. Why am I attending this event, the reader may ask. If it was just me, I wouldn't spend an evening at a formal dinner with my classmates unless I was being paid exorbitant amounts to do so, and even then I'd probably ditch out early. In this case, though, it's not just me, and some among my classmates -- one in particular -- can be most persuasive, and so I'll be attenting. All that being said, my attitude isn't as negative as it may seem, if only thanks to the miracle of sognitive dissonance. It *is* going to be a huge party and a lot of the people who are going to be there are nifty, nifty people who I genuinely like, even if I can't be bothered to talk to them. I'm quite confident that I'll have a good time at the party... and if I don't, it's less than a fifteen minute walk from my appartment and I'm home.<P> The trouble with these cocktail dinners, though, is that they don't offer much that appeals to a creature like myself. The official schedule is as follows: Cocktails at 7pm; Dinner at 8pm; Dancing at 10pm. I don't dance and I don't drink (I can do both, but I'm terrible at them) and the menu choices at dinner aren't thrilling either. That leaves me with two choices: I can go and assume I'll be bored, which will almost certainly prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, or I can actively look for ways to make the evening more... interesting. My fingers automatically steepled themselves when I wrote that; typing with the heels of your palms is very annoying.<P> Option 1: Dress up. Or, depending on your point of view, dress down. The invitations, as I said already, don't specify a dress code, and while the Hilton staff might look down their noses at me if I don't show up in appropriate clothing, I'm moderately certain that my classmates won't kick me out. If I felt so inclined, I could always show up at this black-tie event wearing torn jeans, and old and ratty t-shirt, and unmatching socks. This is a very attractive option because it's a bit of a smack in the face to any overly order-aligned folk who takes these events too seriously and will be good for a laugh for everybody else. Assuming I'm the only person iconoclastic enough to pull this gag, it will also be a huge attention-grabber... which may or may not be a good point, since I can never predict ahead of time if a given evening will be one where I want to hide from attention or be the center of it. Alternately, there's always the opposite approach; I could be the only person to show up in ceremonial armour and cape, which, though tricky to arrange on my current budget, isn't beyond my talents. While I might consider being the center of attention for being underdressed, I don't imagine I'll be extroverted enough that night to want the sort of attention that comes of being cape-clad, so I doubt I'll go with that plan... most likely I'll go with a happy medium; wear dress clothes but not black-tie level, and wear my necklace instead of a tie. I've also got a lapel pin of a rolling pair of d6's somewhere, which I think I might just dig up for the event. "Fancy dress" is so subjective, after all. Alternately, I've been looking for an excuse to buy that Miskatonic University lapel pin off eBay...<P> The other way that crosses my mind to make the evening fun would be to play around with their schedule a bit. Sure, *officially* their schedule lists only cocktails, dinner, and dancing, but it's funny how things like The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen have a way of sneaking into itineraries when you least expect it. It's a bit of a long-shot to assume that there'll be a good crowd for that sort of thing in attendance, but I know more than one gamer and seanachaí who's planning to be there and, particularly thanks to the micracle of an open bar, you never know what might happen. If that doesn't work out, I do happen to have a large supply of fnords all printed up and gathering dust, so I'm sure I could think of something fun to do involving those. If not that either, then there's always the simple joy of arguments, and at last check more than one hundred and twenty three first-class minds had RSVP'ed that they'd be at the party. And if none of that works, maybe I'll try actually dancing like a normal, sane person, just to see if I like it (I have every reason to assume I won't, but I've never actually tested, and that's not scientific). <P> Well... this may not prove to be *fun* per se, but at least it'll be a new experience. One way or another... <HR> <a name="439"></a> <U><B>The Imperial Plagiarized (Medical) Encyclopedia</b></u><p> Given the material which my class has been studying of late, it seemed like it would be appropriate to take a moment to share some of the words which are most newly-added to the Gamers' Dictionary. Enjoy, or don't... we value reader autonomy and right to choose.<P> Auscultation:<BR> The act of listening to sounds arising within organs, such as wheezing within the lungs, murmuring within the heart, or whooshing between the ears.<P> Blood:<BR> 1: The primary circulatory fluid of humans and most animals, rich in proteins which allow it to transport oxygen, nurtients, medications, magical schoolbuses, bacteria, and electricity.<BR> 2: Nutritious and delicious.<P> Honker's Sign:<BR> A neurological finding wherein an individual goes "beep" when poked in the nose. Used to test the functionality of the 1st (opthalmic) branch of the fifth (trigeminal) cranial nerve in muppets.<P> Hyperplasia:<BR> An increase in the size of an organ due to an increase in the number of cells which constitute it without an increase in the size of the cells. Commonly diagnozed in neoplastic conditions or in Excel spreadsheets (but only in columns marked "expenses").<P> Hypertrophy:<BR> 1: An increase in the size of an organ due to an increase in the size of the cells which constitute it without an increase in the number of cells.<BR> 2: A phenomenon of the modern prison system. <P> Lateral Epicondylitis:<BR> A form of tendinitis preventing full extension of the elbow. Common to players of many sports, hence its common name, "frisbee elbow."<P> Lymph:<BR> 1: A plasma-like fluid, usually clear and devoid of red blood cells, which traverses the body via lymphatic channels and nodes, and contitutes the excess fluid in a body which is in flux from the tissues to and from the blood.<BR> 2: Blood Lite.<P> Lymph Node:<br> Any of many rounded masses of lymphoid tissue located throughotu the body, which conduct lymphatic fluid and play a role in the immune system. Immune cells traveling via the lymphatic system may pick up transfers allowing them to travel via the blood upon exit without buying a second ticket.<P> Palpation:<BR> 1: To physically examine an objectvia the sense of touch to asses its intactness, structure, and shape, as in, "I palpated your skull."<br> 2: To beat thoroughly or strongly, as in, "I palpated your skull."<P> Percussion:<BR> The act of tapping an object to learn the condition of the interior or to deteremine its degree of hollowness. It's got a good beat and you can dance to it.<P> Phrenology:<BR> 1: The study of the shape (particularly dents and protusions) of the skull, based on the belief that regions of the brain which are most used grow more, and thus hypertrophy and atrophy reveal what parts are most or least active.<br> 2: The study of the shape (particularly dents and protusions) of the diaphragm, based on the belief that regions of the respiratory system which are most used grow more, and thus hypertrophy and atrophy reveal what parts are most or least active.<p> Trepanation:<BR> An archaic medical treatment wherein one or more small holes are drilled in the head, ostensibly to free demons and devils trapped inside the cranium. Effective at treating many mental illnesses, epilepsy, headache, migraine, personality, and heartbeat. <HR> <a name="438"></a> <U><B>Part Two, Week One</b></u><p> I've now finished the first week of classes in the second portion of my program; having languashed for eighteen months (rather longer, in my case) in the lecture halls cramming our brains with esoteric and mostly useless basic-science facts, the new segment of our program is a big change. Mornings are now spent in hospital, with students, in groups of six, working with physicians and practicing basic clinical skills while also refreshing only those scientific facts which are actually relevant to the non-scientist practitioner. Afternoons are spent once more in lecture halls, but now rather than genetics and microbiology, most lectures deal with issues such as confidentiality, how to locate things you don't know on the internet, and presentations of various diseases. January sees us with significantly fewer class hours than our lectures did, for better or worse, a phenomenon which may or may not reverse itself come February when we transition from "learning basic skills" to "learning huge volumes of important information and also feeling up patients." In any case, during this relatively relaxed portion of our studies, the major focus of our training is learning how to perform the physical exam -- the part of your visit to the doctor when you're poked, proded, illuminated, and listened to. it seems appropriate at this juncture to set down some thoughts on the transition into the hospitals.<p> Lesson the first: the patient comes first. Obviously, a doctor is expected to put the needs of the ill and hurt above their own, to sacrifice their time and energy towards curing and healing. Healing the sick and wounded apparently also ranks above teaching, as evidenced by professors arriving late, finishing early, or cancelling sessions altogether at, quite literally, the last moment. I can't fault my teachers for this, and in fact I'd have to say that their priorities are in the right place; someone dying off in another room needs them more urgently than the student whose biggest concern is being unsure how to turn on their stethescope. That said, in a perfect world, classes would get cancelled several hours before they were scheuled to begin, and not at their listed start time, particularly if their listed start time happens to be at the end of a three hour break spent at the hospital studying.<P> Lesson the second: all this stuff is actually really easy. A lot of medicine is hard -- knowing Stuff, making mental connections, solving mysteries, real brainwork that takes tremendous ability. The physical exam does not take tremendous ability. In fact, the physical exam is only slightly, very slightly, above the threshold at which a trained monkey could perform it, and it is above this threshold only because it is difficult to train the monkey in proper hand-washing. This morning, for example, we spent over two hours practicing the physical exam for the central nervous system -- the brain, spinal cord, and twelve cranial nerves. One might imagine that testing the human brain would be a somewhat complex procedure, and for specialists such as neurologists and psychiatrists this is no doubt true. For the general physician, and for the medical student, the CNS exam consists of poking your patient with a stick and seeing if it hurts. There's a little bit more to it than that, but really, not much, as I shall now illustrate as I guide you, the reader, through this examination. First, you assess overall cerebral functioning, meaning the patient's overall cognitive level. Is it difficult to measure the patient's global sentience and mind-body functioning? In point of fact, under normal circumstances, the entirety of this measurement is done by welcming the patient into the examining room, getting them to sit on the bed, and asking how they're doing today. If they can walk in, climb onto a bed, and hold a conversation, you assume that's all fine. Next, we test the twelve major cranial nerves. Well, we don't exactly test *twelve* nerves; we don't really care if nerve 1 (Olfactory, which mediates the sense) is working, because it's not very important, and the sense of taste (Nerve 7, the Facial) is messy to test and also relatively unimportant. Now, we do the following, in any order we feel like: instruct the patient to move their eyes in all eight compass directions, instruct the patient to make two or three funny faces, and poke the patient with something sharp to make sure they can feel pain. Finally, for the grand finale, you get the hit the patient with a hammer, because really, what's the point of having any job where you don't get to hit someone with a hammer? And that's it... you've now given the patient a pretty thorough test of their entire nervous system. Of course, if anything's actually *wrong* with them, it gets a little bit more complicated, but in principle, monkeywork.<P> Lesson the third: Just as the tests are pretty simple, interpreting them is also often fairly simple. A lot of physical diagnosis is obvious stuff that anybody could do, if it only occured to them. Consider the test of the respiratory system. Presumably, anybody reading this has had the experience of a doctor tapping them on the chest for no apparent reason. People are trained to assume that if it's not obvious why a doctor is doing something than whatever test it is must be incredibly complex and beyond the average person's understanding. The actual truth will be obvious to anybody who's ever done any construction, played drums, or searched a room for secret doors. When a doctor taps the skin over your chest, all they're really doing is listening to the echo to tell if it's hollow or not. If they tap over your lungs and it sounds hollow, that's good. If they tap over your heart and it doesn't sound hollow, that's also good. Surprise surprise, if they tap over your lungs and it doesn't sound hollow, that suggests there's a problem, but then, the fact that you've been hacking, coughing, and unable to breathe for a few days would probably have already clued you in to that. There's a little bit more to it than that -- learning to tell when a lung sounds *too* hollow, for example -- but in principle, this is a test that anybody could do, and all they really teach us to do is how to tap someone to get the best possible echo sound quality.<P> Will we be picking up more complex and useful skills than these? Yes, within just a few days. We've already learned how to measure the pressure in the right side of the heart using only a flashlight, a ruler, a cue-card and a ball of yarn, for example, and by this time next week I'll have learned to differentiate cancer from the common cold by poking someone behind the ear. I don't feel like we've done much, but it's only been the first week, and if anything, we're behind the point where we're supposed to be on our schedules because of cancellations and such. More news as it develops, but in the meantime, I need to go practice testing if the people around me have sensation in the anterior-most sensory field of the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve. <HR> <a name="437"></a> <U><B>Wisdom of the Ages</b></u><p> "Honour thy father and thy mother" can fairly be said to be one of the most ancient and sacred beliefs of most human societies. The dictum of respecting your parents is ancient and very nearly universal, in one way or another, manifesting as everything from fear of disinheritance to ancestor worship. On a larger scale, it rings familiar in the face of another sacred-ish law, being "respect your elders." Again, nearly universally, almost every culture in the world has institutionalized and created a moral obligation towards respecting those who are older and more experienced than the youth. In part, this is because the older people have traditionally been the ones to make the rules and if the young'uns respect you, they're less likely to beat you to death in your sleep and take your Stuff, but in large part it's because, while certain age groups might have a hellish time getting the idea into their heads, the elders in society have historically tended to be the wisest, most cunning people, and the ones who are in many ways most indespensible to an encampment. You can always train another warrior or farmer, but it takes life experience to be the healer, the shaman, the adjudicator, or, yes, the storyteller. The rule is simple: respect your elders, because they have lived more and deserve it, but also because they know more and are wiser and your life may one day depend on what they know or have seen before.<P> It all sort of falls apart, though, when you consider that "respect your elders" was a dictum they came up with when thirty was middle age.<P> Sit down and think about it for a second. Let's look at biblical figures, not because of historical accuracy but because they're the standards on which a lot of these maxims are based. Ambraham, father of the Jews (amongst others), lived to be one hundred and sevety five years old, if you believe his press agent. Noah, who lived a good deal sooner, reached approximately nine hundred and fifty. David is believed to have lived to seventy. What see here is a rather disturbing pattern emerging, viz, people seem to be dying progressively younger and younger, and fortunately this trend assymptoted or else by the third millenium we'd all be dying before we were born. We often quote that in the dark ages the average person only lived until their mid twenties, but you have to remember that these numbers include 1) high infant mortality throwing off the mean and 2) one in four women dying young in childbirth. The truth is probably that throughout history "really old age" was always in the area of seventy but few people personally knew someone that age and better than fifty percent of people were dead by 50. "Common" old age was 40 or 50, which remained true well into the twentieth century and is still true in various parts of the world. Does a younger old age have implications for whether or not elders should be respected? Let's play with a few more numbers.<P> So, suppose for the sake of argument that you're living in medieval Britain. You have no sanitation to speak of, reliable medication is six hundred years away, brigands walk the roads with impunity, your water isn't safe to drink so you live on beer, and every so often a group of knights runs through your settlement and slaughters every second person, just to keep things interesting. By the age of forty, you've spent thirty five years working in the fields, your body's shot, you're malnourished, this week's plague is migrating this way and they're filming a new Robin Hood movie tommorow which probably means your village is going to get burned down, if you're lucky. You're forty years old, at the end of your life, and surrounded by your children. Are you wiser than they are? Well, you've lived more, but a lot of that has been the exact same experience they've had. You've raised children, but your older kids have helped rase their siblings, so they have an idea what that's like. You've seen more people die and learned how to cope with that, but they've had their share of practice too. Consider, though: you're forty, your oldest child is probably in its mid to late twenties, and most of your children are barely out of puberty, particularly since it started later and lasted longer back then. You may not be *wise*, per se, but you aren't as filled with the raging hormones that make your sons go to the bar and brawl. You've learned to differentiate between momentary lust and genuine feeling. You've received enough scars to understand that you aren't invulnerable and pain doesn't always go away the next day. You've stopped thinking of being drunk as "fun." You don't have to be wise... you're being compared to adolescents, and anything you say that doesn't end in a belch is going to sound like Aristotle. So yes, your kids had better respect you, because you might just be the only one there who understands that if the crops don't get harvested in time, there won't be enough food to last until spring. So, respect your elders, because they aren't unstable, uneducated, danger-to-myself-and-others teenagers. That's the world that invented that maxim.<p> Now, we still tell kids to respect their elders today, but suddenly it's forty year olds being told to respect people in their eighties. The sucessful investment banker is being told to respect his father, an equally sucessful investment banker (retired). A forty year old isn't in the throes of adolescence and has been self-sufficient for some time. They understand such concepts as "if you don't work you have no money" and "if you don't do groceries, food will not magically appear in the fridge." I'm not saying that "respect your elders" is suddenly bad advice, but it has become a bit less useful. The elder has a lot of useful life experience and has coped with more horrors, putting them in a position of being able to give useful advice and priceless insight, but no longer is it quite the same thing. That's the trick, you see. Throughout history, a major component of "the wisdom of age" was really nothing more than "a little bit of maturity and self-control." And these days, a lot of people never learn self-control and, in any case, you don't tend to develop much more of it at seventy than you had at fifty. <P> Now in my case, I've got good cause to respect my elders. In my immediate life, my elders tend to be family or professors. The gene for incredible niftiness runs in both sides of my bloodline, so respecting my parents is easy and rewarding. My professors are, pretty much without exception, physicians and scientists, brilliant individuals who have dedicated themselves to saving lives and making the world a better place, and are by and large very friendly and caring people to boot, above and beyond the fact that I have to play nice with them if I want a good grade. The point is, I don't respect them simply because they're older, but because they've earned it. My parents have earned my respect, not by virtue of being my parents, but by raising me well, doing everything they could to give me a good life, and instilling in me values that make me *want* to respect them. My professors have earned my respect by living lives wherein they've got proof that they've lived things I can't imagine and by offering up their own time and energy to teach me how to cope with the same crises they've faced. These are people who have wisdom but also *demonstrate* their wisdom, and have never told me that I ought to respect them simply because they were born first. They tell me, in fact, that I should question them, that I have a responsibility to question them, and a fair percentage of the time I find that they're right, or at least on the right track. The venerable senior citizen glaring at me because I walk too fast or because I don't surrender my place in a line? I'm sure they're also a kind and caring person, filled with a wealth of knowledge and experience and a far better person than I can ever hope to be, but until they give me some proof of it, they're just another human, deserving of courtesy and non-malevolence but not respect. <P> The test being if I feel the same way when I'm seventy, or if I'm mad at these darn kids who don't show me proper respect for my age... <HR> <a name="436"></a> <U><B>Majesty</b></u><p> Some few people -- not to name names, of course -- have noticed that for about a month now, the quote at the top of my Journal changed every third day and followed a thematic link. If you read this via the LJ or Facebook mirror, you'll be completely oblivious, just like you've missed out on other content which is visible only on the aericanempire site where I have full creative code control, and so to you I say simply: ha ha, you fool. Normally, I change the quote at the top of this Journal about one every three or four Entries, when a new quote occurs to me, but for the last month or so it's been changing with every post. Each and every one of those quotes has been something said by, relating to, or about a single individual. My initial plan had been that I would use only things which this individual had said, but let me tell you, it is bloody difficult to find a large number of good, useable, short and to-the-point quotations by Joshua Norton, first and only Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, and so I started also using things that had been said about him, quotes from his obituary and the obituary of "his" dog, and when I really started reaching, quotes from an issue of the comic book <I>Sandman</i> in which Norton was a character. Tragically, we don't have many real records of things Norton actually said, which is a shame because by all accounts he's said to have had quite a way with words. For many reasons -- the time in which he lived, the fact that he had no fixed residence, the fact that he was regarded as a semi-mythological figure and the fact that newspapers tended to invent proclamations in his name combine to ensure that today, a thorough search of the Internet was not able to find me fifteen catchy quotes I could attribute to him without the help of Neil Gaiman. Of course, I firmly believe that reading a bit of Neil Gaiman solves most of life's problems, but be that as it may, this doesn't one way or another say much about Emperor Norton. And so, since he didn't say much about himself, and other people haven't said that much of interest about him, I suppose the job falls to me. It's two days early, of course, but then, I'm committed to an every-three-days schedule and that's just the way the dice roll.<P> So here's the big questions about Joshua Norton: to this day, we don't really know whether or not he was fruitloops. Here's this sucessful, wealthy businessman who loses everything due to a single hit of Incredibly Bad Luck and, homeless and destitute, declares himself the ruler of one and a half countries, holding so fircely to the belief that the entire city of San Francisco embraces him and does everything in its power to make him believe it's true. It's easy to look at him and assume that the shock of having his fortune wiped out broke his sanity. Could he have had a nervous breakdown, creating a psychotic break? Maybe so. On the surface the whole "emperor of the US" thing certainly looks enough like a delusion that most psychiatrists would have him on antipsychotics before you could say "Samuel Clemens? Never ehard of him." He probably didn't suffer from schizophrenia, though... if he did, records would probably show that he'd had periods of lucidity when he didn't believe he was royalty, and he probably would have had other behavioural problems or symptoms. Could he have been purely delusional without suffering full schizophrenia? That's quite possible, and it's not unheard of for the collapse of one's life to drive someone crazy. That too, though, would likely have been time-limited, and it seems odd that the delusion would be quite so focused and consistent. Given everything I know about Norton, it's my contention that he probably wasn't particularly crazy at all. As I see it, there are two possible ways Norton could have gotten his start. First, he could have had some sort of transient delusional episode in which he believed he was emperor of the United States, and upon recovering from it, found that all these merchants were offering him free food and the people treated him with, if not respect, then at least warmth. In that situation, wouldn't the most sane, stable, sensible thing to do be to keep playing the fool? The second option -- which I consider to be equally plausible -- is that Norton was never mad at all, even for a little while. Lost and with nothing to his name, he might have decided to proclaim himself emperor for any number of reasons: busking, attention grabbing while panhandling, even simple boredom. This was a city desperately seeking local celebrities and heroes, and even stray dogs could achieve a measure of fame and media exposure if they had a recognisable appearance and were good at catching rats. When an aristocratic-looking homeless man with a british accent starts claiming to be the emperor, no one is likely to believe him, but humour him? We might be surprised by how many people humour him. <P> The part that gets me -- speaking more as a psychologist and med student than historian, perhaps -- is that, of course, you can't diagnose someone with a mental disorder, particularly megalomania or something like that, without meeting them. Norton died in 1880; he practically predated modern medicine, let alone psychiatric care. It never occured to anyone to give Norton a complete psych evaluation, and even if it had, *and* he'd agreed, it wouldn't likely be very reliable by today's standards. After a century of legend and myth, it's hard to even look back and say whether he really believed he was the emperor or if he would "break character" sometimes. I'd give a lot to be able to sit down with the man and talk to him, see what he thought. From the academic perspective, I hate a mystery and would just want to figure out what diagnostic label I might apply to him. On a more pragmatic and, yes, more fan-boy level, I just want to know if he was nuts or if he was one of history's greatest liars (or at least, jesters). There might not be a world of difference between "mental patient" and "trickster spirit" after all. <P> Happy deathday, your Majesty. Your legacy lives on in some of us. <HR> <a name="435"></a> <U><B>Dress Coding</b></u><p> In my fourth year of high school, I began to wear button-down shirts over my t-shirts as a second layer. The basic impetus for this -- aside from a curious habit I've always had to mimic my older brother -- was that, at the dawn of one of my rebirths, I felt it was time for a change to my lifestyle, and so I changed my manner of dress to be the closest you can come to wearing a cape in public without looking like a complete loony. This was somewhere in the area of 1997 to 1998, and as of December 31st, 2007, I still dressed in the exact same manner. If you held up a picture of me in 2007 and a picture from 1998, you would think I was wearing the same clothes, and if the later picture of me was one where I was freshly shaved, you might think the pictures were taken on the same day if you didn't look too closely. Holding up two pictures of myself right now -- one from winter of '99 and one from winter of '07 -- there are only three differences to speak of: in the newer picture, I'm wearing my Amulet, I'm a teensy bit broader at the shoulder, and my face is thinner and more corpse-like. If I didn't remember throwing out the black overshirt I was wearing in the older picture, I wouldn't even be sure I actually was wearing different clothes. All of this is interesting not for the implications it might allow one to draw about my personality and my mental state, but more because as of January 3rd of 2008, for the first time in a decade, I'm changing the way I dress.<P> Today was my first day sitting in a lecture in the hospital. Having completed our 18 months of formal science lectures, my class has now entered what's known as Introduction to Clinical Medicine, and for the next month (Introduction to Clinical Skills), one half of each day will be spent in hospital, sitting at a table with a physician and learning practical doctory kinds of skills, namely the physical examination ("how to poke and prod someone without getting sued"). For most of January, students practice these skills on each other, and by the last week of January, we'll be feeling up actual non-student patients. The funny thing about working with real patients is that McGill has a policy that students should look like real doctors as much as possible, and as such, are expected to dress up "properly." When I left home in the morning today, I was wearing a shirt, good pants, and a stylish grey and blue tie (I use the half-windsor knot, personally). In the afternoon, I added to this my White Coat, and if you didn't notice that my ID badge read "student" then you might easily have mistaken me for a (very short, frighteningly-young looking) doctor. <P> The real kicker? "Professional dress" specifies that appearance must be dignified and mature, and that jewelry should be understated or even avoided. In principle, I agree that doctors and medical students should probably be discouraged from flashing bling, but in practice, when a rule is made which disallows large, flashy, childish decorations, my Amulet falls under that category. For the first time since August of 1999, I deliberately went to school without my Amulet today. The whole day, I felt oddly naked, even unarmoured. Wear the same item every day for long enough and it rather becomes part of you; classmates who don't know my name have always been able to identify me as "the guy who wears that huge smiley face necklace." Bad enough they rob me of my cape... they won't be happy until they've robbed me of what makes me unique, special, and mentally unstable. Which, from their point of view, might not be a bad thing (fnord), but in my unbiased and objective opinion, they're wrong, and also ugly.<P> It isn't all bad, of course. I'm perfectly willing to change my mode of dress if it means furthering my education, particularly since the hospital where I'm working throughout January is only about 5 blocks from my gaming store. They may have taken my cape, and limited the amount of black I can wear, but they've given me free reign to walk around everywhere in my White Coat which is practically a cape in and of itself in addition to being a symbol of power and authority in the eyes of patients who don't know to check if they're waist-length or knee-length. Also, I'm not quite so restricted all the time. While I'll soon be dealing with patients on a daily basis, for January at least, many of my days will have zero patient contact, and I can dress however the heck I want (in fact, since students will be examining and palpating each other, we're actually encouraged to show up in t-shirts, and on days that we practice musculoskeletal exams, I'll be one of the few people in a Montreal winter wearing shorts). And, of course, there's the one reason that I like anything in life: it's a chance to lie. I've discussed before that dressing up in a special manner to go to work is a sort of lie; in my case, it's all carefully calculated (and explicitly designed by the school administration!) to create the illusion that I'm a mature and competent health-care practitioner. Sure, our handbooks and ethical codes go on about how lying to patients is bad, but apparently covering up your true self under clothes and lab coats is just fine. It's a lie most patients want, if not demand, and to me that just makes it all the sweeter. No lie fills me with as much joy as one that someone wants you to tell them, even if this lie isn't particularly funny.<P> Still... I do miss wearing my amulet. Maybe I'll start wearing it under my shirt or something... <HR> <a name="434"></a> <U><B>Boldions and Determinions</b></u><p> The new year draws nigh. 2008 is looking to be an interesting year for me, as I'll be starting in the hospitals by the end of January. I'm in a good place and life remains pleasant and gods-touched. More than any year of my life for a very long time, this year stands to present me with a lot of unforseen experiences and, horrifically, adventures. I've always felt that the best way to cope with uncertainty is to have clear goals to keep you centered on what you want and where you're going... if you have an inkling what you want your life to be working towards, it's much easier to keep a handle on all the other little terrors that life brings. Conveniently and by an astonishing concidence, these thoughts happen to be occuring to me on the very day that, at a societal level, the whole of Western culture opens wide their arms to the Goddess and raises their capacity for self-delusion to a whole new level as, with renewed hope and utter blindness to irony, they set new year's resolutions.<P> First, let's check up on how last year's resolutions went. They were:<BR> 1) I will continue to give out business cards<BR> 2) I will fix more errors in my journal archive<BR> 3) I will spend more time playing with plush toys<BR> 4) I will maintain my physical training<BR> 5) I will put genuine work into my classes<BR> 6) I will improve my circle of friends<BR> 7) I will give at least two news or magazine interviews about the Empire<BR> Well, six out of seven isn't up to my usual standards, but it's certainly not bad. I did continue to give out business cards, which was both useful and extremely fun. I did fix more errors in my Journal archive, and though arguably I didn't fix very many, I hadn't set a minimum goal. I spent lots more time playing with my stuffed toys, which was rewarding and fulfilling. I did maintain my physical training fairly well; I've been a bit lax these last couple of months, but my waistline hasn't changed, my weight is constant, several muscles are more well-defined than last year and I'm able to lift a few pounds and do a ew sit-ups more than I could last January. I did put *lots* of real work into my classes, and not only did I get much better grades, I've actually mastered some elements of the material ("mastering" being different from "learning" in so far as I can recall the information more than a week after the exam and have proven myself able to apply the information to daily life). I did improve my circle of friends and have gotten to know many very cool people this year. The one item at which I failed was that I did not give a single significant interview this past year on matters related to the Empire; I *tried*, and sent letters to several newspapers over the course of the year, but my phenomenal luck was used up in more important tasks and I didn't manage to make any interviews happen. I *did* see my flag flying in a Paris art museum and oversaw substantial improvement to the Empire's entry on Wikipedia to the point that nobody's nominated the article for deletion since last January. Whatever the case, I happen to think that accomplishing six out of seven resolutions is more than most of the people who make resolutions manage, so there you go.<P> This brings us to the coming year's resolutions. The truth is that off the top of my head, I almost have trouble thinking of things I want to make resolutions because, let's face it, I'm fantastic and it's hard to imagine things I'd want to improve (I could resolve to be less arrogant, but really, who wnats to do that?). A few possibilities do present themselves, though, primarily things academically-related but also with some other, more important things mixed in. For the year of 2008, I resolve:<P> 1) I will learn and master the skills of advanced first-aid. I've never learbned first-aid before, and while I know the theoretical grounding of stuff like helping a choking person or restarting a heart, I've got no clue how to actually do it in practice. In theory, skills relating to saving the life of a dying human might one day be marginlly useful for a doctor. Either way, all students in my class are required to be certified in Advanced Cardiac Life Support which means whether I want to or not, I'd better become good at it within the next month or two. This is one of those skill sets I intend to master in addition to learn.<P> 2) I will work hard and study in general. Once we're in the hospitals, we'll be expected to pick up an amount of information which is well past "excessive" and right on ito "ridiculous." I'm largely looking forward to that, though once I'm studying six hours a day again like I was in December I won't enjoy it so much. I *will* learn the things I'm there to learn, because it's going to be very nifty information and because any obscure fact I pick up really could save someone's life someday, or at least form the basis of a KP 42 story.<P> 3) I will read at least twenty novels. My actual goal is a minimum of twenty-six, but I don't know how busy I'll be this coming year and I don't want to commit to something I might not accomplish. I worry somewhat that I'll find myself so swamped with work soon that more important things, like books about killer robots, might fall to the wayside, and I really don't want this to happen. I may find that I'm forced to give up weekly gaming in the coming months, but I won't give up my books.<P> 4) I will edit more Journal posts. Not a matter of earth-shattering importance, but I take a lot of pride in my writing and that archive really *does* have a lot of typos in it (with more arising every three days, of course). <P> 5) I will stay in shape and exercise. I'm carrying this one over from last year precisely because, as I said above, I've been slipping a bit. Before I moved out I got a good cardiovascular workout at least once each week. but since moving, for some reason I'm down to only once every two weeks or so, and it's not due to a lack of time or energy. I'm not promising that I'll get myself back up to one week, but I certainly won't let myself slip any further. I've got enough ego-based and non-ego-based reasons to stay in shape that it should be easy.<P> 6) I will make at least six book or magazine submissions over the year. I dearly love to write and seeing even a single piece of mine get printed somewhere would make my life incomplete on a whole new level. Given my frequent assertion that I've got Satan's own luck when he's not using it, and I'm confident that if I keep at it, in another eight or nine years I'll see something I write published for money. Can't win if you don't play.<P> 7) And finally, as I move into the hospitals, as I live on my own, as I find myself growing and maturing with each and every day, and as I become a responsible and hard-working member of society, I resolve to work every day to remain a bastard, a thief, a liar, a rake, a rook, double-crosser, double-dealer, bluffer, charlatan, faker, humbug, imposter, mountebank, pretender, fox, knave, prankster, rascal, rogue, plotter, schemer, sneak, fabricator, fibber, prevaricator, storyteller, perjurer, distorter, falsifier, equivocator, palterer, cheater, cozener, deceiver, defrauder, dissembler, dissimulator, and trickster. I will also remain an avid reader of Merriam-Webster.<P> Happy new year! Weasels and snuggles to everyone. <HR> <a name="433"></a> <U><B>Outside Of A Dog</b></u><p> Most of the people I know and associate with are voracious readers. Most of my friends tend to be the kind of people who make it through at least one book per week, often more. Ever since I started significantly reading for pleasure in grade 7, I've been a novel-a-week person myself, with that number dropping only this past year when I suddenly and unexpectedly found other, more entertaining activities to occupy my time in class between lectures (as a result, this year I averaged about one novel every two weeks). In any case, one or two friends of mine actually take so much joy and pride in their reading that they keep a running list of all the books they read each week, and inspired by such fine minds, I decided last year that it might be fun to try to take note of all the books I read myself. I started this list on January first of 2007, adding to it the book I was reading that very day, and have faithfully kept it in the full year following. Now, as the year draws to an end, I've dug up the file and, thanks to the miracle of copy/paste, you get to see every item that was on it. Because I take a curious and irrational sort of pride in my word count every time I post an Entry here, I've included brief annotations on each.<P> First, a couple of generalizations. First, as will quickly become obvious, every single item on this list is fiction, and with only two exceptions, sci-fi or fantasy fiction. Many of my friends fill their time reading non-fiction books, expanding their minds and educating themselves, becoming better people and wiser thinkers. That's fine for some, but I'm in medical school and I learn way more stuff every week than I want to as it is, so when I do my reading, it's for entertainment, not education. Second, for years I told people that I reread the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy every year, and while that was true for two years of highschool, three years of CEGEP, and three years of undergrad, I haven't done it for either of the last two years. Douglas Adams therefore does not appear on this book list. If it's any consolation, I *did* play through Starship Titanic, which he wrote. Finally, some people will be surprised when they see a relatively low number of books on my list (well, low relative to the people in my social circle, not relative to a normal person). It should therefore be specified that the list presented does not include 1) textbooks and course packs (by my best estimate, about four thousand pages of information-dense material), 2) roleplaying sourcebooks (of which I read many this past year, including the first two books of White Wolf's <I>Scion</i> series which I've really been enjoying) or 3) the <B>countless</b> comics that I read this past year. On any given week, I'll download and read between ten and twenty-five comics, and over the course of a full year, it's probably realistic to say that even at a low estimate I went through at least one thousand comic books. It takes me about 5-10 minutes to read most comics, and I take about one minute to read one page of an average novel. Suppose that an average book is about 350 pages; I have no clue if that's a reasonable assumption, but it's 30 pages less than the last book I read and twenty pages more than the one before that. The time I spent reading comics this year translates into an additional fourteen novels worth of reading.<p> A warning before you go any further: even by my standards, today's post is *long.* Nobody will be blamed for skimming today.<P> 1) The Princess Bride (1/2) <BR> 2) Death's Dominion (1/2)<BR> I had started re-reading The Princess Bride late last December and only finished it a day or two after New Years. I only read the first half of Death's Dominion, a story of Frankenstein-style monsters in the near future, because it was in my backpack when my car was broken into and my bag stolen in the first week of January.<P> 3) Cell<BR> Stephen King's take on 28 Days Later. Not that impressive, but decent for what it was. Despite the fact that I enjoy most horror novels, I've never much liked Stephen King, for unclear reasons. Something about his writing style just gets on my nerves.<P> 4) The Codex<BR> Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have written some of my all-time favourite novels, all the more interesting since their work isn't really sci-fi or fantasy but more akin to mystery, a genre I normally hate. Their novels frequently require a master's degree or higher in some esoteric science or another to fully appreciate. The Codex was actually one of their least enteraining books, having nothing at all to do with their main series and characters. Still, a decent read.<P> 5) Smoke and Shadows<BR> A Tanya Huff vampire novel which suffers somewhat for being uncertain if it's a story about wizards and living shadows or how hard it is to get a date in Vancouver. Fun, but not memorable.<p> 6) Traitor General<br> 7) His Last Command<BR> Both set in the Warhammer 40K universe and both parts of the Gaunt's Ghosts series, these books were good, mindless entertainment. The author, Dan Abnett, is currently the main writer in charge of Marvel Comics' "cosmic" book line, and is doing a fantastic job; his Warhammer novels, military sci-fi in this case, are good but not great. It's telling that more books from that series show up further down on this list.<P> 8) Heroes Die<BR> I've mentioned once or twice here that Matthew Stover is one of my top five favourite authors ever (number 5 on the list, but still on the list). This was the second time I read this novel, and it appears to be one of those odd books which actually gets better every time I read it. I've read the sequel (the better of the two) three times... a fourth may be just about due.<P> 9) The Redemption of Althalus<BR> I've always found it very interesting that despite popular culture's love of the rogue, they don't usually appear as primary characters of a book. This fantasy novel, spanning several thousand years plus time travel in various directions, has as its staring character a liar, cheater, and thief the likes of which I could only aspire to being. What really separates it from other books where the hero is a deceiver and rake is that, by the end, he still hasn't learned to change his ways, and remains a deceiver and a rake. Good for him.<P> 10) Sabbat Martyr<BR> The book which follows Traitor General and His Last Command. It just keeps going on and on.<P> 11) Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Betrayal<BR> 12) Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines<BR> 13) Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Tempest<BR> 14) Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Exile<BR> The Legacy of The Force series of Star Wars novels is groundbreaking because they started it by planning a huge story arc focusing on all the most annoying characters from the previous 21 book series, and then hiring the least good authors from the previous series to write the new books. None-the-less, it's Star Wars, so I'm contractually obligated to read them. Between the four of them, there was probably material for one good novel, which isn't too bad.<P> 15) Stardust<Br> Given how much I love Neil Gaiman, it's actually odd how long I went without reading this one. I made darn sure I'd read it before seeing the film, of course. I'm not usually one for fairy tales and love stories, but I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Above and beyond the really enjoying the stuff between Primus and Septimus, the writing style was archtypal Gaiman and a pure joy to read.<P> 16) Duty Calls<BR> I enjoy the Gaunt's Ghosts novel because it shows the Warhammer 40K in a very realistic, very dark way, giving an excellent feel of the world and universe. I enjoy the Ciaphas Cain novels *more* because, in addition to doing all that, they're also hilariously funny. The main character is the perfect balance of true hero, coward, opportunist, and utter bastard; the writing style is what I wish my own stories looked like.<P> 17) Grunts<BR> The novel which in part inspired my character in a currently-ongoing Demon: The Fallen game, this book is the story of a company of ORcish soldiers in a Tolkienian setting who, for reasons which go unexplained until the last five pages of the five hundred page novel, suddenly find themselves with a stash of automatic weapons, rifles, tanks, and helicopters. A war story on the surface, the book is actually quite light on violence and the real fun is watching how the orcish society evolves and the warriors develop from club-wielding thugs to disciplined, world-conquering marines.<P> 18) Goblin Quest<BR> A novel of humour-fantasy, this book takes a typical group of dungeon-crawling adventurers and tells their story from the point of view of the helpless and hapless goblin they force to lead them through the tunnels while they search for treasure. The story itself isn't particularly original, but it's done in a manner I'd never seen before (even in other "monster's POV books) and was very funny. The sequel is sitting in my to-read pile as I write this.<P> 19) The Bug Wars<BR> Possibly Robert Aspirin's only non-comiedic novel, this book chronicles a war between two alien species, one (the main character's) of reptiles and one of insects. What makes this book noteworthy is that the reptile species is undergoing rapid evolution throughout the story, such that the main character has to learn how make use of, amongst other things, the first ever troops under his command to be born with colour vision, redefining their notion of "camouflage." Not actually a good book, but I picked it up at a used book shop and it was worth what I paid.<p> 20) The Screwtape Letters<BR> Given my academic and professional interest in villainy, it's odd that this is a book I wasn't more familiar with. I'd read The Screwtape Letters once before, years ago, but didn't remember it at all and, at the time, had found the dry style impossible to follow. Rereading it now, it's a compelling and witty pastiche of human nature, as told from the point of view of the demons who spend their existence trying to corrupt human souls. While the book grated on my nerves from time to time due to its very Christian flavour and ethical points of view, it was much fun. Read as an eBook... I might not have been able to read the whole thing if I hadn't been able to listen to music and play Freecell at the same time.<P> 21) Reaper of Souls<BR> 22) Warpsword<BR> More of Dan Abnett's work, but this time in the Warhammer Fantasy universe rather than the futuristic Warhammer 40K. I find the Malus Darkblade novels moderately interesting, but not gripping. I'm told by others who have read them that their greatest appeal is the shock and horror the reader feels as the main character, possibly one of his world's most evil and depraved individuals, cuts an ever-bloodier swath across the land. Since I don't shock or disgust easily, I find the books rather dull, but I enjoy them sufficiently to keep reading them.<P> 23) I, Jedi<BR> Another re-read, this book is interesting among the Star Wars novels in that it takes you through the process of Jedi training; it's not about laser swords, so much as the process of study and learning that's necessary before you swing the sword itself. The first time I read it, I thought it was a brilliant book. The second time around, I couldn't get past how terrible the writing style really is and how horribly, even pathetically the author fails to capture the characters' voices, wavering uncertainly between writing characters with and without contractions. All dialogue is artificial and forced and large parts of the story don't make sense. Still, when I managed to put aside my purist author tendencies, I enjoyed it despite all that... it's still a very interesting perspective into what makes the Jedi different from the teeks and teeps of other universes.<P> 24) A Dirty Job<BR> I didn't reaklly expect to enjoy this book and was a little surprised when my brother picked it up, but it proved to be among the funniest books I read this year. I've read the story of "ordinary guy finds that he has the powers of the Grim Reaper" literally dozens of times in different books, This author takes a slightly different take on the function of reapers, however, and takes a sufficiently different tack to be amusing. A major part of the book is also all about the life and natural history of the so-called "beta male", the smaller, weaker, smarter males who live their lives under the boot of society's alpha males, with whom girls just want to be friends, and who generally must survive using only their wits inabsence of skills actually relating to survival. The book even has a little quiz at the end, to help you tell if you're an alpha male, a beta male, or someone who can't do math. Bonus points for having a character named "the Emperor," a loveable and harmless old man who's acknowledged by the residents of San Francisco as the emperor of the city, and presumably the country at large.<P> 25) Overtime<BR> A significant portion of my bookcase is taken up by the novels of Tom Holt, a British author with a style and voice similar to Terry Pratchett. There are another six of his novels currently sitting in my to-read pile right now, thanks to the miracle of two-for-one sales. The story features a very amusing take on time travel and follows as history's greatest bard, on the run from his agents and the anti-christ, tries to find Richard the Lionheart who has been lost somewhere in time, using only the single clue that he's "in a castle." The last page is a bit of a confusing let-down (actually a very common problem with tom Holt novels) but the book itself is much fun.<P> 26) Death World<BR> Yet another WH40K novel, but this one by a different author. I have nothing interesting to say about it.<P> 27) Wyrd Sisters<BR> 28) Maskerade <BR> My second favourite author of all time is, of course, Terry Pratchett (depending on what day you ask me, sometimes it's Douglas Adams, in which case Pratchett is number 3). These two novels, featuring the recurring witches of his Discworld series, were the last two of the Discworld novels I had yet to read. With them finished, I have now read every single Discworld novel ever released in softcover and have the entire collection sitting in my bookcase; this 30 book set (I'm not counting Making Money because it's not out in soft cover yet) actually takes up too much space to fit onto a single shelf on my bookcase, which frustrates me immensely. Tragically, with the recent announcement of Pratchett's diagnosis with Alzheimer's, there will probably only be a couple more Discworld novels, after which I suppose I'll pick up and read the spin-off young-adults series. In the meantime, the Discworld series is truly unique for being a series of thirty books out of which I've enjoyed and often genuinely loved more than nine out of every ten.<P> 29) Death's Dominion (1/8, more or less)<BR> Almost exactly one year later, I've picked up a new copy and intend to start reading it just before New Years Eve. It'll be the first book I finish in 2008. I think it's important that theres a certain poetry to life, don't you?<P> So, all that being said, I read about 28 books in 2007, averaging just over one book every fortnight. They weren't all good, but I enjoyed most of them, and "I enjoyed most of it" is more than we can ask for out of life most days. I guess when you get right down to it, the bottom line is this: don't you have something more important than this to go and read? <HR> <a name="432"></a> <U><B>Milk And Cookies and Doom</b></u><p> This morning, Christmas Day, I went out at half-past nine in the morning and walked around Downtown Montreal. Montreal is a City That Never Sleeps, of which there are many these days, and before today I'd been in the streets at nearly every possible time of day and stil seen everything filled with busy, bustling crowds. Not on Christmas morning, though... on Christmas Morning (or as I like to call it, "Tuesday") the city was practically deserted. Wide open streets could be seen to be empty for a mile distant, and I could walk down Sainte Catherine for blocks without seeing another living soul. Much as I enjoy the quiet and hate crowds, I found it a little bit disconcerting... it was a little like stepping outside to get the morning paper and realizing you've stepped into a George Romero flick. It makes sense, of course, that this should be the one day of the entire year when the city's streets aren't fuilled. Like it or not, Christmas does dominate the cultural landscape, and so, today, nearly every person who lives in this entire city is at home.<P> Because they're all checking their Santa traps.<P> What would Christmas be without Santa traps? Don't tell me you wouldn't want to get ahold of that magic bag of toys if you could, even just for long enough to pull out a few action figures and a videogame console. Sure, trapping Santa might not be easy, but you can't win if you don't play, and Santa-trapping is a low-risk, very high potential benefit activity. It might take a certain amount of work, and yes, you're almost guaranteed to fail (Santa is a sneaky ol' bastard, after all, who's evaded capture by many people over the years), but even the small possibility of sucess justifies the effort. Of course, Santa-trapping can be very difficult -- above and beyond his obvious supernatural abilities -- since I'm Jewish, my appartment's got no chimey, and as an inveterate deceiver, I'm probably not on the "good" list in the first place, but Santa doesn't punish failed capture attempts and I never spend much on my traps, so there's really nothing to lose and potentially a world's worth of toys to gain. This year, yet again, I failed to catch Santa, and so down come the traps for another year, but then, as with any hunt, it's not the having as much as the getting which matters.<P> In previous years, my Santa traps have been restricted because I was sharing a home with other people. This year, though, I had my place to myself on Christmas Eve (before you start feeling too sorry for me, I had company over for multiple nights prior and I'll have company multiple nights after) so I was able to go all-out. As any veteran Santa-trapper knows, there are essentially five basic points during Santa's visit where traps which can classically be targeted. Santa's routine is predictable in terms of his landing site, his ingress points into a home, the location of present deposition, the consumption of milk and cookies, and finally, his escape. This year I was able to rig up traps related to four of these five; I couldn't rig anything in terms of his landing site because I haven't got roof access in the building. Since I couldn't do much about his landing, I focused my attention to the other four.<P> Novice trappers often assume that the most predictable and therefore most vulnerable part of Santa's home invasion is his entrance, and indeed, this is true when you're talking about homes with chimneys. Given a good solid chimney, Santa is pretty much bound to use it, and so the chimney presents an ideal point to lay down first line defenses, be it as simple as a roaring fire in the fire place or a complex system of trip-wires and Rube Goldberg devices that would do a Crazed James Bond Villain proud. The problem here is that, like most appartments in your standard complex, I haven't got a fireplace or a chimney, and indeed, there's no direct link between my place at the building's roof some ten stories up. We assume that Santa can't travel via wiring (though some experts disagree, suggesting that Santa existing as electrons or photons would explain his rapid transit capabilities), and so we're left looknig at four likely points of entry. First, Santa might come in through the front door. For all his other faults, Santa is no fool, and the door is the simplest and most direct way to enter. In case of Santa entering thusly, the door was not bolted or otherwsie locked any more securely than normal, but the doorknob had been linked via a pully system and a long piece of dental floos to the trigger of a small, makeshift crossbow, capable of putting a pencil four inches deep into drywall, sitting opposite the door (with a line of fire at precisely five feet and six inches up, two inches above my own head-height but still near Santa's largeand easily-targeted torso, naturally). Thw two much more likely points of entry were the windows that dominate the whole South side of my appartment. These windows can conceptually be divided into those in the living room and those in the bedroom. We eliminate the windows in the bedroom because, given a choice, Santa will never enter a home via an occupied chamber, and I was still awake and reading past midnight, Santa's typical arrival time. The windows in the living room are near my computer (blocked off by a large desk and my miniatures) and those near the dining table. These windows, the most vulnerable and likely, we secured by means of electrifying the window frame and arranging a laser-grid alarm (if the beams were broken by anything, they would trigger the computer to begin playing Christmas-themed hip-hop, which is instantly lethal to elves). Finally, the last possible point of entry would be the heating system which, though electric, could be used as an access point. To prevent this, the heat was turned up (to make passage uncomfortable) and various pieces of furniture and boxes of Stuff were placed in front of the ducts to block travel. The goal of all this preparation was, of course, to force Santa to have to enter via the trapped dining table window, whereupon the sonics would hopefully kill him and, if not, at least call attention to his entry.<P> The present deposition site is much harder to rig in my home, since I absolutely refuse to have anything resembling a Christmas tree. I instead cleared a space of floor in a traditional tree-area (up against a wall in the center of a ring of seats and couches, not far from the television). I spread a blanket over this space and put on a few pine needles, to complete the illusion. Under the blanket, I hid an old bear trap which I keep for special occasions. Not being specifically bound to do so, though, Santa would most likely simply not deposit any gifts on such an obvious trap, or at least, not step on it himself, and so setting up this trap was more for comleteness than any real hope of success.<P> It was with the milk and cookies that I placed my real hopes this year. In previous years I've invested most of my effort in mechanical traps, with little luck, but this year I decided to take some of my newfound pharmacologic talents for a spin. The chief problem with poisoning Santa is the very short time in which a toxin must be effective... you can't simply add botulinum toxin to the food, for example, because it takes at least two hours and often up to twelve for severe paralysis to result. I went instead with curare, which is more difficult to obtain but which is well worth the effort and which acts almost instantly in large doses, which can be fairly easily concealed in, say, a glass of milk. Curare, of course, relaxes muscles and causes paralysis without impairing conciousness, making it an excellent Santa-stopper; with luck, he might attribute a bit of arm and leg weakness to weariness and therefore remain unaware of the danger for those few vital moments. The cookies, being baked but having the advantage of having more fat (and therefore being easier to fill with drug), I chose to add sodium thiopental, a fast-acting barbiturate. Thiopental is much harder to obtain than curare, but useful because it works even faster, and induces confusion and sleep in addition to muscle weakness. Given the doses I was using, it was highly unlikely that either of these drugs would be concentrated enough to kill Santa (certainly given his body weight and obesity), but the drugs had a fair chance of putting him to sleep or making him unable to move within a minute of ingestion. Sadly, even that length of time might not be enough; it would all depend on whether Santa ate the milk and cookies before or after leaving presents, since he would likely not dawdle for long enough for the drugs to fully take effect if he left the presents first.<P> Finally, I tried to stop Santa's departure. This is an important step, doubly so since, given that my main plan of attack was poison, slowing him down for thirty seconds as he tried to leave could make the difference between stunning success and catastrophic failure.With a chimney, one can cenceivably rig up a system whereby a fat man can slide down but not climb back up, but not having a chimney to work with, and lacking the budget or guilotine-style metal window covers which would slam down only after Santa had entered, I settled for the same alarms and blockages I'd used to prevent entry, plus a small note on the heating vents reading "warning: not safe to travel through" which he would read when he tried to leave but not when he tried to enter. In case he decided to try leaving through the front door after disabling the crossbow (which he was welcome to try, since that would be sure to relay him at least twenty seconds to a minute), I took the precaution of removing one of the screws from the inside doorknob; the door could be opened just fine from outside, but from the inside, anyone attempting to open the door would find that the knob simply came off in their hand.<P> In any case, all my precautions came to naught. No sound disturbed my slumber and there was no Santa or bag of toys on the floor of my apartment when I checked the traps in the morning. I salute a worthy foe, and of course, I'll have new and deadlier traps next year. Can't win if you don't play. <HR> <a name="431"></a> <U><B>Know What I Mean?</b></u><p> Last night while walking through Downtown, I was wished a merry Christmas by a group of out-of-towners (Albertans, as it happens) wandering the city. The initial greeting could be attributed to the fact that the one who said it was very, very drunk, but he was nice enough for all that and, when he and his friends realised they'd found one of the city's rare Anglophones, they walked with me for a block or so asking me about the city, why I had no French accent, and if I could help them find a metro station. Amusingly, they were genuinely shocked to find that I had no French accent, and I had to reassure them a couple of times that I was, indeed, Montreal-born and bred before they took my word for it (again, I imagine blood alcohol levels had some effect on this, but still). As I led them to the nearest metro access, we chatted a little bit about languages, how rare anglophones appear to be to tourists in this city, and how I didn't have any idea how to say "merry CHristmas" in Hebrew (oddly, it's a phrase that doesn't come up very often). <P> My mastery of French -- or lack thereof -- is a fairly frequent source of stress for me, of course. Above and beyond the fact that as an intellectual snob I feel that I really ought to have a better grasp of something I spent so many years studying, my poor French is a severe inconvenience at best and a major weakness at worst. The truth is, in fact, my French probably isn't so bad, but growing up and now living amongst people who are truly bilingual in the sense that they even think in multiple languages makes me look bad in comparisson. A significant number of my current classmates speak French as their first language, and I always feel a bit guilty about how they switch to Enlish when they speak to me. Among my friends, the vast majority speak French better than me or, indeed, were raised in French-speaking homes. What I've never been one hundred percent sure of is whether my fears about my French abilities were justified, or if I've been comparing myself all these years to people who speak better French than I have any need for. If you want to know how good your study skills are, you don't want to compare yourself to the top students in a class, after all, and if you want to know how strong you are, you don't compare yourself to an olympic weight-lifter. <P> Case in point: McGill's medical program offers a French class every year specifically geared to help med students pick up the French they need to work with French patients. It has three streams of difficulty. The basic level, for the truly unilingual, is designed to help the stduent memorize useful French phrases for stereotypical situations. The next level teaches basic conversation skills to those who can say their name and how where the washroom is but not much else. The highest level they offer, "low intermediate," is an actual immersive course where students are taught terminology specifically related to medicine. To get into the course, you have to do a small written test and a fifteen-minute phone interview tih a French speaker, so that they know what level of difficulty to assign you. I must have impressed somebody to a small degree, because when they sent me the results of my tests, they said I was "intermediate" and spoke French too well for their courses. So, while I worry endlessly about how pathetic my French is, the school apparently feels that it's good enough to fucntion in the hospitals, and they actually refused to take my money rather than put me in a lower-level class. On the one hand, it's very nice to have that sort of reassurance; on the other, now I'm going to spend the next three months worrying abotu whether I should have deliberately performed a bit worse on the test, so that I could get into the low intermediate class.<P> And then, of course, I might be misjudging my French skills because I'm comparing them to my own English skills. Typos aside, my mastery of spoken and written English is truly phenomenal, certainly better than the average for my age group and probably at least as good as most graduate-level students in the language. When I speak French, I'm painfully aware of the fact that it takes me more effort and time to form each individual sentence, but is it really wise to be judging that relative to the ease I have with English? I speak English so fast, after all, that most people have a hard time following what I'm saying... maybe the slowdown I have in French is merely slowing me to a level where other people can properly comprehend me.<P> To be honest, my French, while not *great*, is probably "good enough." I know that I performed at least one full-hour patient interview this past year in French and managed to grasp most of what was said to me, and only failed to translate what I wanted to say twice in that time. I'm able to express myself in French, not with the beauty and poetry that I can in English but enough that I can get my point across. I can insert a bit of clever wordplay into my French, though most of that's just the same universal changes in pause and inflection that I use in English. For the purposes of being in the hospitals and asking people to fill in forms or asking them which part of their body hurts, I've probably got more French than I need. I defintely have more than enough French for making casual conversation, which is pretty much the extent of what a medical student is expected to be able to do for the next year of my studies. And now, on top of my own experience and practice, I've got some empirical test results that say: "You know what? You aren't great, but you're more than good enough." So, maybe I can speak French, after all. On a good day, even understand it when someone else speaks to me.<P> The astute reader will by this point suspect that I'm trying tp presuade myself and not them. The astute reader is, of course, rather astute. Either way, whether my French is good enough or not, we'll know soon enough. <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; //-->