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 441-450<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/401-500/451-460.html">Entries 451-460</a><BR> <a href="#450">Entry 450</a> February 17 2008<br> <a href="#449">Entry 449</a> February 14 2008<br> <a href="#448">Entry 448</a> February 11 2008<br> <a href="#447">Entry 447</a> February 8 2008<br> <a href="#446">Entry 446</a> February 5 2008<br> <a href="#445">Entry 445</a> February 2 2008<br> <a href="#444">Entry 444</a> January 30 2008<br> <a href="#443">Entry 443</a> January 27 2008<br> <a href="#442">Entry 442</a> January 24 2008<br> <a href="#441">Entry 441</a> January 21 2008<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/431-440.html">Entries 431-440</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="450"></a> <U><B>Yggdrasilly</b></u><p> Over the course of our medical education, one of the things which we're taught how to do is to take a family history from a patient and use it to construct a genogram, or more colloquially, a family tree. A genogram is useful because it creates a pictorial representation of, for example, the patterns in which certain diseases strike related individuals, which allows us to ascertain if an illness might be genetic, associated with lifestyle, the result of an ancient Egyptian curse or what have you. Non-medically, a family tree is interesting because it lets an individual trace their genetic line and see clearly who and what they've come from, which is an important and perhaps often overlooked element of that all-important question: who are you? About a year and a half ago I became somewhat interested in the idea of starting to maintain a family tree of my own, with the eventual goal of tracing my family vertically (and, less interestingly, horizontally) as far as I possibly could. Only in the last few days have I started actually taking steps towards making this project happen; I've downloaded seven or eight different family-tree generating programs in the last few days and am slowly trying to find one which actually has the features I want, which is surprisingly challenging for some reason.<P> I've always been quite interested in my family history. I come from a very colourful and eccentric genetic line. I've mentioned before the old Russian/Polish legend which suggests that my paternal (and possibly also maternal) line is descended from Veles, the Slavic trickster god, for example. Sadly, a lot of my family history is lost forever to the mists of time; my father's family, beung Jews in Poland and Germany, were all but wiped out during the second world war, and my grandparents themselves passed away years ago (getting reliable historical data from them is therefore arguably not impossible, but certainly difficult and probably very expensive). My mother's family, being in Canada during the war, remains large, widespread. and extremely talkative, and indeed a distant cousin of mine is already working on (and almost finished) an encyclopedic family tree of that side, but I don't know if he's collecting the sort of information I'm curious about. Any family tree created by me is certainly never going to exhaustively stretch back one thousand years, and probably won't even go back more than four generations, both because of insufficient data available and laziness on my part, but I'd certainly like to see how much data I can gather. Knowledge is, after all, its own reward, and well worth collecting for its own sake.<P> The chief problem I'm running into at this stage isn't one of data collection, but simply that I can't find a good program with which to generate the tree. We've all seen countless pictures of vertical family trees, with ancestors stretching up to the top of the page, descendents stretching down, and everybody's names in a little box connected by simple black lines... for some reason, though, after trying at least eight of the most popular programs available, I have yet to find a single one which will make that simple diagram. Perhaps I've misunderstood all these years how professional geneologists go about making their chart, and perhaps I've got too specific a vision in mind of what I want my family tree to look like, but I never anticipated it might be so difficult just to vertically arrange everybody's name in little boxes connected by straight lines. It's a frustrating, annoying process, and I've done more installing and uninstalling this week than I have since... well, since the last time I got a similarly pointless and unecessarily specific idea stuck in my head, which probably wasn't actually that long ago, but the point stands. Some people might look at this and ask why I don't just do the genogram freehand, drawing it up myself, and not try to find a computer program to do the work for me. To you I say: just 'cause.<P> A family tree appeals to me as a scientist, a healer, an historian, and a liar. As a scientist and healer, it's invaluable to have information about your genetic stock. The more medicine I learn, the more obvious it is that, for better or worse, genetics is playing an increasingly large part of medicine, and knowing what cancers have appeared in my line, how many people have had diabetes and at what ages, who had heart disease and who developed dementia, even tracing who else might have had some of the same genes as caused my own Hirschsprung's disease might all have significant implications for how people I know get treated or even how quickly and how accurately. My grandmother died of cancer... did her mother also? Both of my paternal grandparents died after years of mental deterioration... could/should I be doing anything right now to reduce my own chances of following suit? As an historian, I'm interested in knowing even just the names of people, but maybe also some stories about them. I know very little about the "Uncle Chaimeleh" after whom I'm supposedly named, even though to all accounts he was a very sweet and extremely clever fellow, but I'd like to know more. And finally, as a liar... family legends suggest that I've got tricksters on both sides of my family going back generations, and both of my family surnames really can be linked to Veles, if somewhat spuriously. I've known families who can make an honest (at least, they honestly believe it) claim that they can trace their family line back to King David or some similar figure. I'm assuming that I won't find a great-great-great grandfather who walked around everywhere wearing a helmet with ram horns and hissed all his "S"'s, but I might be surprised to find that I can trace the family back farther than I expect, and you never know who might show up. The Goddess has given me enough surprises over the years that I wouldn't be too shocked to find something interesting. <HR> <a name="449"></a> <U><B>To Seek Out New Life And</b></u><p> I've observed here in the past that I don't think of myself as much of a videogamer. It used to be that compared to any two of the people I regularly socialized with, I played fewer videogames per week than they did; this is no longer true, since many of my medical school classmates claim, true or not, that they don't have time for such things, but it remains true when I'm compared to most of my non-school friends. One of the few exceptions to the rule has been, as far back as I can remember, Sid Meier's Civilizations series, which I've always loved far more deeply than makes sense. Back when I was at Concordia regularly during my three years of undergrad and first year of medicine, we had Civ III on the club's computer, and since my workload tended to be pretty light back then (psychology classes never required me to do more than a few hours of studying per week) I'd while away hours moving little armies around the screen, conquering other, less fortunate game sprites. While I understandably didn't bother keeping records about how much I played, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that during the quieter periods of my third year, when I would sometimes come into the gamesclub even on days when I had no classes, I would easily spend up to ten hours in a given week playing Civ III. Sure, it might have been a bit excessive in terms of sheer hours sitting in front of the cathode ray tube, but I didn't skip class, I saw friends several times a week, and I had a girlfriend, and that's closer to having a proverbial life than I have been for most of my existence. I look back on this utterly witout regret; if I died right this moment and the Gatekeeper of the Gods asked me if I'd lived a life well spent, I'd swear so emphatically (obviously, I'd swear so whether it was true or not, given such a situation, but the important thing is I'd mean it).<P> All of this wouldn't matter much these days, because now that I'm no longer at Concordia and I have my own place at which to host games without imposing on my family, I haven't set foot in the gamesclub office in close to a year, and thus, haven't played any Civ III at all. It wouldn't matter, except that last I week I installed Civ IV. My studying time hasn't been perceptibly cut down, but I do find that I'm suddenly going through comic books and roleplaying sourcebooks more slowly than they can accumulate. I mean, I've had Scion: God sitting waiting for me since February 2nd and I haven't even read page 1, and anyone who's been following how much I'm enjoying that series will appreciate the gravity of that statement. <P> What's the appeal of the Civ series? The game is painfully slow at times, extremely complex, easy to play but difficult to master, and frequently becomes downright infuriating, especially when playing on higher difficulty levels. Despite this, it's consistently been one of the most addictive game series in history, and no one knows how many clones and rip-off games have been developed. All four games in the series have won numerous awards, and for good reason... they're extremely widely played and widely loved. Civ IV, for example, was named the best game of 2005 by at least three or four of the main and most influential magazines and websites in the field. The game's deep appeal, I think, can be attributed to the fact that it gives us what all of us (or maybe just people like me) really want deep down: the World. Starting from a single settler in the year four thousand BC, you spend six thousand years claiming the entire world and uniting it, one way or another, under your banner, and you go about it in a manner which is comprehensible and believable, or at least comes closer to it than any game involving dragons, vampires, and superpowers. The game has a sense of power because it runs you through the whole course of human history, if imperfectly. The new iteration of the game, which includes such previously-absent features as seven possible religions to spread across the land and Hollywood and Rock & Roll world wonders, is really quite remarkble in how it plays out. My one complaint with the game is that it doesn't reach far enough into the future, but because the series strives for historical accuracy, it's forgivable that it avoids the sci-fi elements which I feel would make it more fun.<P> If anything, Civ IV is even closer to being my ideal game than Civ III was, for one simple reason: it's got built-in cheat codes. It's rare that I play any videogame without cheating, and it's a rare game that's able to capture my attention and imagination enough that I'll actually want to play it fairly. In all my hours of playing Civ III, I did so using a trainer program downloaded online. Trainers, for the benefit of non-gamers reading this, are simple programs developed by people other than the game evelopers, which while running, allow you to change how the game plays. In the case of Civ III, the one I was using provided infinite money, allowed production of any military unit or building in a single turn, and allowed research of new knowledge to be completed in a single turn, when normally both might take ten or a hundred times as long. The game was no challenge at all, and before one thousand BCE, my tanks would typically sweep across the land and scour it clean of all my foes, and that's how I liked it. Civ IV has built-in cheat codes, all extremely easily accessible, meaning that I didn't even have to look for a trainer the way I had for its predecessor. If anything, I find the cheats in Civ IV to be a bit *too* powerful... the ability to produce a hundred tanks in the first turn of the game and produce every available building and knowledge instantly takes a bit of the fun out of the game even by my twisted standards. That's not to say I don't play it, but rather to say simply that I don't use the cheat codes to their absolute full potential, and while none of the other civilizations in the game have the proverbial snowball's proverbial chance in proverbial hell of capturing even one of my cities, let alone defeating my civilization, I'm not able to lay waste to them quite as quickly as I could if I felt like it. By my standards, that's fair play.<P> The important thing is, I'm not actually addicted to the game. Webster defines addiction as "compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal; persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful." Since installing the game, my playing it *has* been compulsive and habit-forming, but it's not yet harmful... this evening, for example, I haven't played Civ at all, because I had to study and then, once that was done, I knew my time would be better spent writing this post a day early, so that tommorow, I have time to play Civ. I'm defintely a user, but not yet an abuser. And I really don't know if I want to give Sid Meier a great big hug or a tobacco-company-style class-action lawsuit. Either way, the tanks will roll, but it's all for the betterment of Civilization. <HR> <a name="448"></a> <U><B>Eat Drums!</b></u><p> On a whim, I found myself on Wikipedia reading about national animals this evening. In part, this was research on my part... there's been talk on and off for the last decade about picking a national animal for the Empire but nothing's ever come of it, and I was thinking of raising the issue again this May, so it seemed like it would be a good idea to see what sort of animals other states used. I found a number of interesting things in my reading: first, that some nations have picked really odd national animals, and second, there isn't any reason in the world why a national animal can't be a plush weasel.<P> First off, let's look at some of the stranger choices which countries have made. People reading this are most likely to be familiar with Canada's iconic beaver and the United States' bald eagle. These seem like sensible enough choices. The eagle is an iconic animal with a proud bearing and tremendous killing power, while the beaver, though not particularly noble or heroic, is tied inextricably into Canadian history since the demand for its pelt was one of the major motivating factors for colonization (oh, yes, and it builds stuff and is very tough to kill). Other countries have made similarly sensible choices; while most people in Bangladesh understandably would not want a tiger wandering into their homes, it's easy to understand why a government would want to be associated with a sleek, beautiful, regal, and dominant animal. The logic gets a bit fuzzier when you consider countries like Mauritius, whose national animal is the Dodo... a bird which was widely regarded as ungainely, ugly, and stupid, and more to the point, has been extinct since the 17th century.<P> And then, on a whole different level, there's Israel. I've got mixed feelings for Israel in a lot of respects. It's the country of my people and a beautiful and properous land, filled with hard-working men and women of many faiths and cultures. It's a world leader in numerous areas of scientific research, including health care. Despite traditional right-wing leanings, it is in many ways a fine example of how a state can make social programs work. I'm not necessarily a supporter of all of the state's military and cultural policies, and there are some major problems with how the country is run, but that's true for any country in one respect or another. The country's national animal? The cobra. I find this more than a little bit curious. Israel is, as far as my three minutes of research was able to determine, the only country in the world to embrace a poisonous viper as its national animal, and I find this doubly odd given that it's a country dominated by a faith which has traditionaly equated snakes with evil incarnate. Somehow, the adoption of the cobra as a natinal animals strikes me as a very odd message to send to other states. Yes, on the one hand, it sends a very clear message to a county's enemies, of which Israel had and has plenty, but on the other hand, what message does it send to the country's friends? Fortunately, to my knowledge, there's no country in the world which has as its own national animal the mongoose, or you can be sure there'd be trouble. Why might the cobra have been chosen? Heck, I've been pondering that for the last hour and have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. Quite possibly it's because, as mentioned above, it does send a pretty clear message, being "we're small, but we're fast and deadly and we strike first at the slightest sign of danger, and our venom makes your red blood cells explode." Or something to that effect. It could also be that, back in Israel's history, when half the country was swamp and half was desert, the cobra was one of the very few animals which was ubiquitous throughout the land. This somehow doesn't strike me as being a good enough reason, mostly because while they may have been found all over the place, the zionist colonists at the time were actively trying to drain the swamps and irrigate the deserts, and it's safe to assume that they were also trying to find a way to reduce the number of cobras. Certainly, when I was last in Israel, I didn't see any of them sunning themselves in the streets, which suggests to me that, as the Bengalese have already found, the mere fact that it's your national animal doesn't mean you want it around.<P> So, if the Empire were to have a national animal, what might it be? Certainly, a few options jump readily to mind, and fortuitously, no "real" state in the world yet has adopted either the weasel or the penguin as its national fauna. The penguin hasn't been picked most probably because states try to pick as their animals something which is found within their borders, and Antarctica, where the penguins roam, isn't within any territorial borders. I can't say precisely why the weasel hasn't been picked; it seems like an obvious choice, fully consistent with the rules by which states appear to make their choices. Weasels are found all over most countries, they're tied deeply into the mythologies of many cultures, they're intelligent, they're cute, and they're very good at surviving. sadly, few countries ever bothered to ask my thoughts on such matters when they were picking theri national animals, which was obviously a severe and inexcusable failure of forethought on their part.<P> That begs the question, though: does the animal which a state picks have to be alive, or for that matter, real? I'd have assumed that the answer was yes to both counts, but that just goes to shwo why it's bad to make assumptions. Looking again at the lists of national animals worldwide, we see two patterns. First, there's the countries like Mauritius which picked extinct animals. Second, there's countries like Armenia and Scotland which have picked entirely fictional animals, notably the dragon and unicorn, respectively. The dragon and unicorn might be mighty species tied inextricably to worldwide mythology and the collective popular culture both, but really, when you get right down to it, they're both totally fictional, the claims of some cryptozoologists aside. You can argue that dragons and unicorns are more real than trolls or goblins because of the power which they hold over our imagination, but that's an argument which is grounded in assumptions and its credibility varies proportionally with the listener's blood/alcohol levels more than anything else. So I say to you, if a national animal can be the unicorn, why not a plush toy? A plush toy is at least tangible.<P> None of this is to say that the Empire has any plans at this time to adopt the plush weasel as its national animal. Even I'm not seriously considering this, and even if I was, it's a decision that would have to be made in conjunction with a whoe bunch of other people, most of whom don't have my unbridled and primarily irrational love for the species. If the Empire did pick a national animal, it would probably either be the penguin or the halibut in either case. <HR> <a name="447"></a> <U><B>Or You Will Be Late</b></u><p> Thought for the day: If James T. Hook is anything to go by, then somewhere up in space, there's a captain whose right hand has been replaced by the national church of Scotland, as distinguished from the Church of England or the Episcopal Church in Scotland.<P> So anyway...<P> For the past week, I've been doing my surgery clinic week, wherein I have seven three-hour blocks scheduled in various surgery-related departments in the hospital, including general surgery, orthopedics, plastics, ear-nose-and-throat, colorectal, and urology. All in all, I've seen an astounding number of pantless humans this week. I also got to watch my first wound packing (the procedure wherein a wound which can't easily be closed get stuffed full of gauze and sent home to be someone else's problem), and on a not unrelated note, I also got to see human blood spurt a good two feet into the air out of an open abdomen, which was a whole new sort of experience for me. More interesting than all of that, though, was the chief observation I made this week, which goes a long way to explaining why medical care in the whole civilized world works the way it does. Namely, pretty much every doctor I met this week was late.<P> This isn't to say, necessarily, that the doctors I observed were behind schedule, though often they were, or that they were leaving patients waiting for long periods of time beyond the time at which they were told to show up, which they often were, but rather that most of the doctor I observed this week were late showing up for or starting their clinics. In some cases, such as the surgeon who opened an hour and a half late because his secretary was attending a bar miztvah, the delay in opening was apparently known well ahead of time and patients had been informed -- not that anybody bothered to tell me before I showed up on time, but that's students' rights for you. In most cases, though, the doctor was simply late, and nobody seemed particularly shocked... everybody except me seemed to take it as a given that the doctor shows up when the doctor shows up, and if they're less than fifteen minutes late for the start of clinic it's something noteworthy. As a student, this can be frustrating, because I arranged my schedule to be on time, and frightening, because if you're supposed to meet a professor at a certain time and can't find them then the first worry is always whether they'll understand it was their fault. As a future practitioner, though, I find this greatly relaxing... it's good to know that if I decide to show up consistently late to work, nobody will much care.<p> I really should say -- if only to cover myself in the incredibly tiny chance that someone with authority from my hospital should read this one day and put two and two together -- that I don't mean any of these comments to reflect negatively on the doctors I met this week. The last five days saw me interacting with some eight physicians and easily twice that many nurses, and while each of the doctors had elements of their style that I appreciated or didn't appreciate and gimmicks that I would or wouldn't want to steal for my own use, with only one exception, they were excellent doctors with good bedside manners, genuine concern for and empathy with the patients, and a real willingness to waste their own time to teach the hapless and helpless med student a bit about what they're doing. They were, by and large, nifty nifty people, who didn't even appear to look down on me for being a psychologist, which is about as far from being a surgeon as it's possible to get in the health care field. And, in turn, I must have done something right because all of them wrote, on the feedback form which proves to the school that I attended their clinics, that I was interested (one even went so far as to say "keen") and showed a real interest in the process and the patient (all faked on my part, of course, but then, they probably write the same comments for every student who doesn't fall asleep on shift). Most (not all, but most) of the doctors I followed were real menschen who I'd be perfectly happy to work with again. They were still late.<P> See, here's the thing, as near as I can tell. It's *expected* that doctors will be late. It's been conditioned and made a part of popular culture. Whether it became a perception because it was an unfortunate truth, or whether it was made true by the profession through years of subtle manipulation to make the job easier, it's a fact of life. When a patient was seen on time, they were clearly shocked, and once or twice a patient asked if we were sure it was their turn... there had to be some mistake, because they hadn't been waiting for long. Clearly, the whole thing is a variation on the Miracle Worker Technique, cleverly designed so that a doctor who wants or needs to slow down can do so without fear of surpirsing patients, but an energetic physician can keep up a logical pace and thus either earn coffee breaks between consults or persuade an entire afternoon's caseload that they're Barry Allen (or Wally West, if they've got a better sense of humour). It's a vast conspiracy to which I'm slowly being indoctrinated... unfortunately, as a student, *I'm* expected to be everywhere precisely on time and still stay late when a shift ends, but that's students' rights for you.<P> Oh, and don't tell anybody I said this, but going out to the hospitals, meeting patients, listening to them talk about their lives, seeing the totally unearned respect they had for me just because I was wearing my Shiny White Coat, and trying to solve their problems and make them feel better... for a few moments here and there, I was almost having fun. But don't tell anyody, because that's not the sort of rumour I want getting out. <HR> <a name="446"></a> <U><B>Famous Firsts</b></u><p> Previously, when I'd tested typing my name into google, the first match was always a famous surgeon at Sloan Kettering (arguably a much more accomplished and brilliant man than I) or a baseball player (because there wasn't any justice in the Universe). Today I tried it, and the first match was the Empire's Wikipedia article. Life is good.<P> It is, perhaps, unsurprising that it was an historian friend of mine who uncovered when I became a serious gamer and writer. I played D&D occasionally while in high school and my misadventures with the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game stretch all the way back to the middle of gradeschool, but it wasn't until the end of high school and early cegep that I really started to apply the title of gamer to myself. What tipped the balance for me was when I started playing on some freeform writing RPG forums associated with the online kingdom-building game, Utopia. This half-forgotten time in my life -- actually, arguably not even a time of my life, since it dates back to the days of Eric 3.0 -- was the time when I really started to get a handle of characterization, theme, story development, and all kinds of other stuff essential to the even halfway decent storyteller. Equally and perhaps even most important, because these were freeform text-based forums, this was the time of my life when I really, truly learned how to write. Playing on these forums forced me to learn how to construct sentences, shape dialogue, show rather than tell, and yes, properly use apostrophes and my beloved and over-used semi colons. If not for those forums, I would never have created many of my all-time favourite characters and storylines, and I almost certainly wouldn't have developed my love of -- some might say my addiction to -- writing. I still would have had this immesurable raw talent, but without all that practice, it wouldn't have been nearly as well-used.<P> Remember, kids: if you're ever trying to fake my writing style or forge my work, the secret is to make ample use of semi colons. It's as easy as that. It may help to also use double-dashes and elipses, but the rules I use to decide which of those to use in a given phrase are complex and eccentric; you can get by without them.<p> Anyway, the point of all this being, historians are funny folk, and so thanks to some semi-obsessively kept records dating back a decade, I once again know when it was that I first started playing on these online forums. I haven't got an exact date, but hope, like a tigger on methamphetamine, springs eternal. More core group of high schooll friends and comrades-in-brains began playing the Utopia kingdom-building game on approximately December 9, 1998. We don't know precisely when we started playing on their forums, but it can't have been very long after. This would have been about midway through grade 11 for me -- less than a year before I began CEGEP, discovered my natural aptitude for sophistry, and was Reborn. The Aerican Empire wasn't yet keeping formal records and its mailing list wasn't even set up yet; I owned a smiley-faced glow-in-the-dark key ring but the idea of attaching it to a piece of leather to make a necklace out of it had never occured to me; I had a vague interest in golems but had never used one as a character in any games; I had read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but not The Princess Bride; we still thought that Star Wars: Episode I was going to be good.<P> I played on the Utopia forums for between one and two years, eventually quitting because of 1) lack of time on my part to get online and write and 2) a serious decline in quality of the other players. For that year or so, though, the forum was one of the bright shining spots in my life, a place I could go to stretch my rapidly-evolving brain in new and exciting ways. The players on that forum -- many of them, at least -- were truly remarkable minds who I feel priviledged to have known and written with, and many of the things I wrote with them back in those days (although regrettably, none of my best work) remains archived and appreciated on my computer to this day. These folks helped me learn how to write; playing with people who used form and structure for their posts, I felt obligated to match their quality, and it's fair to say that my writing style has been influenced by those players as much as by any published author I've ever read. Those days shaped my fantasy life; plots and stories I helped create in those days became the basis for my D&D games in CEGEP and I was still plagiarizing from myself in my games at the end of undergrad five years later, because I still hadn't run out of stockpiled ideas and NPCs from that one forum. Utopia helped shape my elitist tendencies; a good writer was always in demand for games on the forum, while poor writers (speaking objectively, not subjectively), though omnipresent, were somehow excluded from the best stories, a system which was perhaps unfair but which was immensely satisfying and which improved the lives of many.<P> Perhaps most importantly, Utopia helped build my ego, quite independently of the huge impact it had on my identity. The end of highschool was a bit of a rough time for me; I had few friends and I'd done quite poorly in school (except, of course, in English class). In almost every area of my life at the time, I was feeling quite inferior to almost everyone else around me in those days. I hadn't yet discovered my innate gift for the social sciences, and so I believed myself to be, at best, a mid-level intelligence capable of B's in most courses and capable of barely passing physics and chemistry. My friends, gods bless 'em, never made me feel inferior, even when all three of them consistently did ten to twenty percent better than me on every single academic exercise (except in English, where the margin was only a few percent). On the Utopia forums, though, I wasn't merely another player. I was a player that people actively solicited to join their storylines. I was a player who could take on two diametrically opposing characters in the same story and make it work. I wrote plots and story seeds that kept people interested when other stories died and vanished due to boredom. I was voted to play the most machiavellian, the most diabolical, the most captivating, and the most wholly evil villainous characters for a full year running, and I only stopped winning those votes when I stopped running. Peter Wingfield couldn't carry off a line of dialogue better than I could write it, on or off a horse. Let's not hide behind false modesty: I wasn't the best writer on the forum, but I was doing the thing I'm best at in the whole world.<P> And now, nine years later, I'm a writer and a gamer. It feels good to be able to look back and say, yeah, that's how long I've been at it, give or take. <HR> <a name="445"></a> <U><B>Knot A Problem</b></u><p> It's no secret that I'm not very proud of my hands. A hereditary hand tremor runs in my family; some days, my hands shake so badly that if I try to sign my name with my right hand, I need to hold my wrist steady in my left. In addition, my hands have a tendency to move on their own without any conscious action on my part, so that even if the shaking isn't too bad, I could easily find that they've filled my notebook with drawings or dissasembled a pen into its component parts. My handwriting is nearly illegible, I'm not to be trusted with sharp objects under any circumstances, and if I don't pay enough attention, it's not unheard of for my hands to start shredding my own skin. All that being said, it's understandable for years that since applying to medical school I assumed that I wouldn't enjoy learning surgery. Imagine my shock and surprise, therefore, to discover that in actual fact, I hate learning surgery.<P> Did I say "shock and surprise"? I meant "not surprised even a tiny bit." They also interfere in my typing sometimes.<P> This week, my colleagues and I were brought to the medical simulation center, where students who are barely one step above "danger to themselves and others" use inanimate plastic models (as opposed to most models, who are animate plastic) and other non-living tools to learn how to draw blood, insert intravenous catheters, insert foley catheters (the ones which enter a bladder and thus have much greater comedic potential), and today, suture wounds. The first times I drew blood (last year and the year before), I remember being somewhat pleased to be told by the supervisor that, despite shaky hands, I was something of a natural, and appeared to have a knack at finding and piercing veins with minimum effort. More recently, we learned how to insert catheters into veins, which I have as yet tried only on plastic arms but appear to also be good at. Venous catheter insertion was our first surgery skills training session this month, and it lulled me into a false sense of security, giving me the illusion that I might actually provve to be competent at some other surgical skills... after all, they all come down to dexterity, right?<P> It's been shown that there are areas of the brain which allow us to recognise objects. Most of us take for granted that, say, when we see a shoe, we can understand what it is and what it's used for, but if certain parts of the brain are damaged, these seemingly simple tasks can become impossible, in a manner which most people can't even conceive of. Damage a brain in just the right spot, and a person might remain perfectly capable of seeing an envelope, recpgnising an envelope, even descring what one does with an envelope, but then prove to be unable to figure out how to fit a piece of paper inside an envelope. Damage another spot in just the right way, and someone will have the ability to explain precisely what a key is, what it's used for, and what they look like, but when looking at a key sitting on a table in front of them, couldn't differentiate a key from a banana, a hammer, a live hamster and the severed head of Joan of Arc. Some days, I suspect I may have a similarly small and inexplicable lesion, because I have tremendous difficulty understanding motions that I see people making. Take, for example, knot tying. The ability to tie a knot is supremely important for a surgeon, because they have to be able to suture closed a wound, and today we spent a full hour trying to learn how to tie two seemingly simple knots (for those who wish to laugh at me, it was the square knot and the surgeon's knot, arguably two of the easiest knots in the world to learn). I can actually tie a decent square knot, but the objective today was to learn how to tie it in a particular way, which allows you to maintain tension on both parts of a cord at all times. I read the instruction manual; I watched the demonstrator tie the knot in four different ways. I watched a second demonstrator. I watched two classmates. I went through tying the knot step-by-step fully a dozen times, slowly, with classmates. I practiced tying the knot for half an hour. And if you asked me right now, with my life depending on it, I could not tie that knot. In part this is because when I try to tie it, my fingers don't bend the way I order them too, and each step in the tying process is hellish. In part, this is because I'm not good at copying movements that I see done. And, in large part, it's because, as far back as I can remember, I've always been all but unable to learn sequenxes of fine movement. I'm a crack shot with a rifle and I can walk and run with respectable speed and grace, but I can't learn how to tie a knot if it takes more than three steps.<P> arguably, I'm not that bad at suturing, but since we did suturing immediately following my great frustration with knot tying, I was not in a positive mood. Learning suturing was interesting because, to make it realistic, we couldn't practice on models, and so each student received a severed pig's foot on which to work. Suturing is, to me, much easier than knot tying. I'm a decent painter, because painting uses relatively large motor movements, and the whole hand is coordinated; my painted miniatures aren't Golden Demon quality, but their eyes have pupils. Similarly, suturing requires fine control, but all the fingers move in the same way, and different fingers don't have to be moved in different directions at once, which is the part that tends to make my cerebellum seize up.My sutures weren't that pretty, but their level of quality wasn't actually that different from the quality of those sewn by my colleagues. In particular, we were taught a particular suture known as the running subcuticular suture, which is used on exposed skin because the sutures themselves get concealed and the scar is less visible, and when mine were done you could hardly tell that the pig's foot had had a three-inch inscision there, except for right at the end where I hadn't been able to pull the wound edges quite flush. I wouldn't want someone's life to depend on my ability to tie closed their severed artery (unless they were someone I didn't like, and they had a moment to appreciate the fact that their life depended on my ability to tie closed a severed artery), but at the very least I was able to do a passably decent job.<P> I will, obviously, never be a surgeon. Not only am I *bad* at using my hands, I don't like *having* to use my hands, which means I don't have much motivation to become better with them. I exist in a vastly inferior body, which isn't news to me by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, I have to take some solace in that, I may be utterly unable to learn how to tie knots, but I can always find a way to complain about it that somehow takes up over twelve hundred words. This is why I'll make a heck of a psychiatrist. <HR> <a name="444"></a> <U><B>Wines and Rock Stars</b></u><p> A common complaint heard in medical school, at least where I go, is that "I feel old." The basic problem for a lot of my classmates is that they've done undergraduate degrees, sometimes entire PhD's or more, and now find themselves not only back in school but, thanks to the pre-med program which allows some kids to enter the program with only one year of university behind them, surrounded by classmates who are four, or six, or ten years younger than they are. This tends to make some of the students feel downright aged -- the cut-off seems to be around the age of twenty eight, but it's the thirty year olds who seem to have the greatest stress about the whole thing. Personally, I never had a problem with this sort of thing, perhaps because ever since my second year of CEGEP most of my friends have been younger than me, or perhaps because I'm not yet twenty eight. Either way, today I had my first real taste of the feeling that a lot of people I know suffer from on a regular basis: the feeling that I'm not as far along in my life as I should be, based on what others my age have accomplished.<P> Today, a large group of my fellow students and I spent a full day learning many of the intricacies of anaesthesiology, the field of medicine which most directly deals with pain control. The day consisted of a morning of didactic lectures followed by an afternoon of skill training and practice (and if you knew how easy it is to be killed by a badly-inserted IV needle, you'd never go to the hospital again). The teachers were all anesthesiology residents -- individuals who completed their four years of medical school, earned the right to call themselves doctors, and are now between one to four years into their training in a specialty. One of them was in their second year of residency, placing them a minimum of four years more advanced than myself in the educational timeline. The part I found disconcerting was when I realised, a few minutes into the day, that this resident was someone who had been in my class in grade school. Here we were, the same age, and she's two years post-medical school, and getting paid to do doctory stuff. There was a sudden moment of curious sensation, the feeling of which can only be described as "oh crap, I'm late."<P> How this former classmate got ahead of me by four years was easy to deduce, and she confirmed my guess when I spoke to her. While I chose to do an extra year of CEGEP, then three years of undergraduate studies and *then* an extra year in medical school, she did a normal length of CEGEP, skipped ahead into the pre-med program to do one year of university, and then finished medical school on time, all of which adds up to a significant savings of time. I didn't check to see if she was wearing a wedding ring, so I don't know if she's more advanced than me in terms of interpersonal relationships, and she wasn't displaying bling or carrying an overflowing wallet, so I can't speak to her financial sucess, but in the singular dimension of academic sucess (leading, implicitly, to gainful employment) she's obviously far outraced me.<P> Is academic sucess a race? Not in the least, except in so far as she's been pulling down thirty grand a year or more while I'm still paying tuition every semester. I resigned myself years ago to the fact that my education was going to take a while, and since I started university I've taken it as a given that I can reasonably expect to just be entering the workforce when I'm thirty. I can also look back on my years of undergraduate as being some of the most fun of my life, barring the really stressful weeks here and there; any grade-school classmates of mine who missed out on that time to learn and grow lost part of their childhood and missed out on valuable growing-as-a-person years, to say nothing of the fact that they missed out on the chance to learn all the neat mind-game party tricks I picked up in three years of psychology. I wouldn't want to give up those years, even if I did have a chance of getting into the pre-med program (which I most assuredly did not, given my grades in CEGEP). If I'd lost my undergraduate years, I'd have lost a really special time of my life... and I'd probably have missed out on some stuff that *wasn't* gaming related, too, though at this precise moment I can't think of what that might be.<P> All that being said, do I wish I was farther ahead in my program than I am? Indubitably. It galls me that I'm only in second year rather than third, almost as much as it galls me that I'm being forced to study in the first place rather than simply being handed money and left to my own devices. I don't mind oming in second place, or even tenth, but deep down it always bugs me to see someone else already holding the prize I'm going for, especially if we left the starting line at the same time. Sitting in class with kids five years my junior doesn't make me feel that I'm behind schedule, and neither does knowing that there's a guy in the fourth year of my program with whom I went to high school, but seeing a doctor who's younger than I am does. I can cope with a bit of frustration, and it's already ceased to bother me -- my verbosity on the topic being for the purposes of stretching out this rant more than anything else -- but it's still the first big reminder that, like it or not, I'm arguably not where I had the capacity to be. <P> All that being said, tonight I gave a phone interview with a reporter in San Diego who wants to write a story about my Empire and how wonderful I am. I may be a little behind schedule, but I've sure done some nifty stuff with my time. <HR> <a name="443"></a> <U><B>Eight Things I've Learned This Year</b></u><p> As of today, I've finished my first month (fine, 3.5 weeks) in hospital. It's not wholly accurate to call this pure hospital time, since on average I spent only two to three hours each day actually in the hospital and not all of that time was spent doing official stuff, but I walked around in my white coat, I listened to patients' hearts, I read personal charts, and people got out of my way on the assumption I had more right to be there than they did, so I think it counts. People have asked me this month what I've learned, and answering "how to do the physical exam" is both uninformative and a bit of a cop-out on my part. So, given that my Introduction to Clinical Skills unit last basically the first month of the year, and given that two (perhaps three) of my new years resolutions directly related to doing well in classes this year, it seems appropriate that I commemorate this moment by setting down, for posterity, some of the things I actually learned -- perhaps even mastered. <P> 1) Some of my classmates, having found me through Facebook, read this Journal. People who I'd have assumed, apparently foolishly, would not share my sense of humour. This jst goes to show that I need to learn greater respect for my classmates, or at least, those who make a point of telling me they enjoy my writing (which as everyone knows, is the single fastest way to earn yourself a warm place in my heart). For the benefit of any of these find folk who might be reading this: In person, I assured you that anything you see here should not be assumed to contitute the genuine opinions of any person, living or dead, least of all me. In text, I'll confidently assure you that, in person, I was lying. Have fun deciding which you choose to believe. Let me know when you pick one. Rule Number One: Confusion is good for the soul.<P> 2) On to more medically-related things. Among other special sessions, we had multiple sessions regarding opthalmology, including one in the clinic looking into the eyes of fellow students. This session was quite interesting, as we got to operate the slit lamp (I'd always wondered what a slit lamp was) and I got to see firsthand just how easy it will actually be to steal huge quantities of narcotics and toxins (I didn't, but I got to see how easy it will be). I also got to learn how you examine if a person has a foreign body lodged under their eyelid, by the expedient of using a cue-tip or similar object to lift the eyes lid up and back off the eye. It goes without saying that I didn't choose to have this done to me, but rather than the professor, a kindly little German man who, based on his accent and mannerisms, may have received his early training in the camps during world war two. Having your eyelid twisted back is precisely as unpleasant as it looks, not because it's painful per se but because it feels really, really wrong. Rule Number One: Never volunteer for anything, and if someone is about to look for volunteers, take one step back in case everyone else does.<P> 3) On Thursday mornings, I attended Medical Grand Rounds, which is when a prominent speaker is brought in and gives a one-hour lecture -- to the real doctors but also, as a side-effect, to the students -- on some new and emerging medical topic. Lectures I actually enjoyed included state-of-the-art research on this year's deadliest bacteria and the antibiotics we'll soon be failing to use to treat them, and ways to measure whether someone is sufficiently sognitively intact to be allowed to drive. We additionally had a lecture on the hottest topics in Cardiology. What was really interesting is that the huge, groundbreak research in cardiology is not showing the efficacy of new treatment or techniques, but rather busily disproving time-honoured, tried-and-true treatments currently being used in the hospitals. It turns out a lot of the stuff cardiologists do probably doesn't work, but because it seemed to obvious on the surface ("face validity" we called this in psychology) nobody ever tested it scientifically to see if it improved survival or quality of life. The big money in the field today is going towards eliminating their own techniques. Rule Number One: Sometimes the advancement of science means giving yourself a big smack in the head.<P> 4) The main patient contact I had was over the course of writing a case report. Each student is set free to wander around the hospital in search of a patient from whom they must take a full clinical history and conduct a full physical exam (minus the naughty bits). I found this a wholly unpleasant task, mostly because it required me to speak to humans with whom I haven't had previous contact. It was that much more unpleasant, though, because of the complications; the first patient I found agreed to the history, but the next day when I returned to do the physical she refused. I sought another patient, who agreed to the physical but refused to give a history, because she found her own past too depressing to speak of. rather than find a third patient -- which it turns out is what my tutor would have asked me to do, had I asked him, which is why I didn't), I wrote my report on two different patients, making it very clear on paper what had happened. Obviously, this would not be proper behaviour were I writing a real report which would affect patient care, but this was just a learning exercise, and the important thing was learning how to write in the correct format, not how to write accurately. Some patients are just unhappy and unhelpful, and I suppose that since I was trying to recruit patients in the the terminal cancer ward, I can't blame them for being a bit depressed. Rule Number One: No matter how spiffy your white coat and shiny your stethescope, some patients are just never happy to see you. <P> 5) St Mary's Hospital Center, where I was, is ostensibly a Christian hospital. Crosses abound, and my clothes smoldered slightly when I walked into the building every morning. In spite of this, while touring the ward I was in, it seemed as though more than fifty percent of the residents were Jewish, perhaps because the hospital is in a very Jewish neighbourhood. I don't know for 100% certain that everyone I thought was Jewish actually was, but a lot of the little old ladies had Slavic-European features, Eastern European accents, classically Jewish (or Russian) last names, and, bit of a giveaway, bibles with Hebrew letters on them on the nightstand. Ironically, I probably met more little old Jewish ladies than I would if I were at the Jewish General, since it's the city's most ethnically diverse hospital, statistically. Personally, I found the prepondeerance of my people to be a little bit depressing, given that I was, as I mentioned, in a terminal cancer ward. I saw a lot of cute little Yiddisheh bubbies dying of metastatic breast cancer. Several of them were younger than my father but looked older than my grandfather. If I'd looked, I suspect I could have found at least one with a serial number tattooed on her arm; I didn't have the heart to look. Rule Number One: No matter how many times you hold a human heart in your hand, some things will still have the power to get under your skin.<P> 6) One of the joys of starting at a new hospital is the chance to be with a groups of students I don't know very well. I'm pretty darn anti-social, and when people have conversations with me, it tends to be in spite of all my natural habits. This past month, though, I was stuck in with a really good group of five other students, people with sufficiently kind and generous souls that they made an effort to reach out and be friendly in spite of all common sense. Unfortunately, my basic nature works against them -- no matter how many times they try to walk with me to or from the bus or something like that, I'll always be the kind of person who vanishes when no one's looking and has a natural walking speed of twice normal human. All that being said, I tried to play nice, and by my standards, I did quite well. I walked alongside people several times. I attempted to carry on conversations, sometimes sucessfully. The truth is -- quite in spite of myself -- I enjoyed socializing with the humans. I hope to build on that success in the coming months, and while I'm far from being comfortable around my classmates, I can at least play nice. Rule Number One: There's hope for everybody, except people who don't use their turn signals when they drive, who should die.<P> 7) On a related note, it turns out I've still got my knack for navigating mazes. I used to love mazes when I was younger, and seemed to have an innate grasp of them, but that's a skill I haven't had to use in a long time, and I was worried it had atrophied. That said, I spent an hour or so wandering around the hospital on my very first day and, for the rest of the month, kept finding myself acting as a sort of guide to classmates, helping them figure out which staircases to use to get from point A to point B and so forth. I'm sure they could have gotten around without me, clever folk that they are, but I did seem to keep finding myself in the lead, and the only one who seemed confident as to which way we were going. This is doubly funny since on at least four separate occasions, I took a wrong turn by mistake but kept walking perfectly confidently, and people kept following me, oblivious. Once, I actually did it on purpose, then got ahead of the crowd, ducked into a staircase before they could follow, and doubled back, just because I could. Rule Number One: Never follow someone unless you're sure you're going to the same place they are.<P> 8) Another advantage of being with a new group of people somewhere is the opportunity to make small reinventions of yourself, and over the last month, I tried toying around with a new catch-phrase. It didn't work particularly well, but I might keep using it for a little while longer, to see if I grow attached to it... after all, it took me months to adjust to saying "be seeing you" as a farewell, and now it rolls off the tongue perfectly naturally. At various times that seemed appropriate, I'd say "Rule Number One" and follow it with some sort of aphorism, truism, or one-liner. So far, no one has called me on it being "rule number one" each time, but we'll see how things go. The important thing is, it's keeping me entertained for the moment. Rule Number One: There is always another Rule Number One. <HR> <a name="442"></a> <U><B>Great Big Problems</b></u><p> I've been criticized once or twice for the amount of thought I've put into my Zombie Plans. I've previously worked out precisely how I'd defend both my parents' home and my own appartment from zombie outbreak, and though I never wrote a post about it, I've also got general notes on what parts of Montreal's Saint Mary Hospital Center are least defensible, most defensible, and most easily escaped (it would actually be a very favourable location in which to hide or from which to escape in an outbreak, despite the potentially huge number of rising zombies common to any hospital). All of this seems to me to be a very sensible thing to do, because no matter how improbable a zombie outbreak might be, it's better to be prepared and for it to never come than to be unprepared when it does. The criticisms of this preparation have tended to fall into two caregories. First and understandably few in number are those who don't see the necessity of having a Zombie Plan... I pity these people, both for their lack of forward-thinking and lack of imagination. Second and far more common are those who point out that yes, I'm prepared for a zombie outbreak, but I've invested so much time and effort into Contingency Z that I've neglected other, equally probable sources of monster invasion. To these critics, I'll simply say: hey, this is me we're talking about. I write a thousand words in five minutes, narrate my day from the perspectives of six fictional characters, and invent whole worlds over breakfast. Naturally, I've got plans in place for other types of monster outbreak and/or invasion... zombies just happen to be among the easiest and most intellectually-stimulating to work with. What other types of monster plans have I got, you may well ask.<P> Webster's Dictionary has no definition of the word "kaiju." Even in the unabridged version. I consider this to be an inexcusable failure on their part. Yes, I admit that strictly speaking the word is Japanese and, in fact, English, but they've got a definition for the word "blog" and so there's no excuse for lacking a word as widely-used and recognised as kaiju. For the benefit of those who may not know the word, we'll turn now to a highly-effective, highly-reliable, and always entertaining alternative: The Imperial Plagiarized Encyclopedia. The IPE defines "kaiju" as "a monster or creature which is of colossal size, durability, and destructive capacity, particularly if it is more than one hundred times the size of an average example of any common animal species it strongly resembles." Originally applied in Western culture to Godzilla and his co-stars or Toho fame, the word has since been used to describe any incredibly large animalistic monster, and it's been seeing use even in mainstream news stories as people talk about the new stealth movie, <I>Cloverfield</i>, though the best film I've seen featuring Kaiju recently was D-War, which is a great film until the last five minutes. Kaiju tend to be over one hundred feet tall, highly agressive, typically nearly indestructible, and for some reason, attracted to the downtown areas of major cities. Given that I'm now living in thw downtown area of a major city, I'd be a fool *not* to have a Kaiju Plan.<P> Just as there are with zombies, there are a few salient factors to be considered with giant monsters. As a group, it can be difficult to create a plan that covers every probable contingency; you would obviously need a different plan to cope with a thousand foot tall fire-breathing reptile than you would to cope with a two hundred foot long serpent or an amoeba the size of a city block. Despite their many differences, though, there are a few near-universal similarities. For example, by definition (at least using the English version of the word, which is strictly-speaking analagous to the Japanese "daikaiju" or "giant monster"), all giant monsters are, indeed, giant. This central fact expains both their level of danger and their greatest weakness. As a general rule, a rampaging kaiju doesn't actually attack and harm any human-sized creatures specifically, but rather racks up an impressive body-count by the simple expedient of walking into large buildings and knocking them over. Indeed, those kaiju who have accumulated the largest body counts, such as Godzilla, have been those who damage property indescriminately, whereas less dense kaiju, such as King Kong, have traditionally had very few kills to their name, and most of the kills they have had can be expected to be soldiers, fighter pilots, and others who go out of their way to attract monsterous attention. In the event of a kaiju attack, the most important point is to get away from major city landmarks, which inevitably get attacked and leveled. In Montreal, the most likely targets would be the city's most recognizable sky-scrapers, which are either in Old Montreal a safe distance away from me or as few as five or six blocks away, but those are long blocks and I'm actually a decent distance away, and uphill of them. The other major target of any monster attack, unfortunately for me, would be the big giant cross on top of the Mountain. The cross itself is a good half hour to an hour walk from where I live, I am on the slopes of the mountain itself, and my appartment building is very nearly in an exact straight line from the aforementioned skyskrapers to the cross. In the event of kaiju attack, I suspect that my building is a relatively high-risk location, and so it would be advisable for me to get out of it very rapidly when a monster reached the city.<p> This brings us to the second problem posed by a kaiju, again indirectly. When a giant monster is rampaging through a city, inevitably, the average human will try to get away from it. Of course, humans not being particularly bright most of the time, this leads to a lot of running aimlessly in the streets, clogging streets with cars, and generally getting caught up and sometimes crushed to death in the ensuing panic. I'm a little claustrophibic, and I'm not fond of crowds or situations in which my ability to move is impeded. I don't like crowds -- especially loud and fast-moving ones -- and I don't like getting stuck in traffic. Obviously, this either limits my flee-from-the-monster options or else ensures that I won't have much fun while fleeing. Montreal being Montreal, it's entirely reasonable to suggest that when the mass panic hits, most of the people who are able to get to cars will do so and attempt to flee by vehicle and at high speed. In principle, I salute the intelligence which say "I want to escape faster than on foot and be able to carry my Stuff with me" but in practice you're talking about a city where the city gridlocks every rush hour and most of the streets are only wide enough for one, sometimes two cars to drive at a time. Now factor in the certainty that fleeing humans will lack the intelligence to drive at a safe pace and obey stop lights (some humans may keep their heads, but most won't, and it only takes one car to kill a pedestrian or seal off a major street). Trying to drive out of the city, unless you have *very* early notice of the monster attack, is going to be a bad idea, and at best it means you'll be forced to abandon your car in the street somewhere. So, we can agree that fleeing the monster is good, but you want to do so sensibly, and on foot. From here, we can suggest that you would want to avoid the major roads, because these will be the ones most filled with fleeing humans. In my neighbourhood at the very least, the city has many lower-traffic streets which could be used to escape the city quickly and efficiently without too much rsk of getting caught and trampled by a panic-stricken stampede. I won't post which streets those are, though, since I want them to remain relatively uncrowded. If you really need my suggestions, I'll have my cel on me while I flee the city.<P> In a zombie outbreak, there are a lot of things you can do to prepare. You can know your nearby buildings, be aware of where you could make yourself secure while keeping yourself fed, and have escape routes planned. In the event of kaiju attack, few if any buildings are truly secure, and some boarded-up windows won't keep a monster out, which leaves pretty much only the question of fleeing. If you can arrange to live in an area that's off the major routes and so less likely to be a monster-avenue, so much the better, but as a rule, all you can do is know which roads you'll take when you run away, keep your backback and a few essentials where you can find them in the dark, and own some comfy walking shoes. As I see it, the fewer factors you're able to plan, the better prepared you should be in terms of all plannable factors. Being prepared is just good common sense, especially when you're concerned about your city being attacked by giant monsters. <HR> <a name="441"></a> <U><B>Rolling Stones</b></u><p> Webster's dictionary defines "trickster" as "one who tricks; a dishonest person who defrauds others by trickery; a person (as a stage magician) skilled in the use of tricks and illusion; a cunning or deceptive character appearing in various forms in the folklore of many cultures." When I speak of tricksters -- with the singular and highly notable exception of myself -- I'm usually refering to the trickster gods. Almost every culture has its tricksters: Coyote and Raven from Native American and Canadian mythology; Loki, Eris, Baron Samedi, Veles, and other gods from the many polytheist pantheons; and various pseudodemonic spirits in jewish folklore which plague humankind. Whether gods or spirits, tricksters are ubiquitous, much like gods of feritilty and war... trickery is, after all, one of those rare things which occur in every society, sometimes with more positive connotations than in others. For better or worse, it may be the Greeks whose stories give us the greatest number of tricksters, in part because so many of their stories have survived to the modern era when the stories of other faiths have been lost, and in part because, perhaps, deception and subterfuge may have been even more common there than in most other nations. Certainly, anyone living in Athens in the time of Socrates would have suggested that they had more liars there than anywhere else in the world, though the nearby Romans could probably have given them a run for their money in that regard. It is one such Greek trickster to which we turn our attention tonight, a figure not often considered to be a trickster in common thinking: Sisyphus.<P> Webster defines "sisyphean" as "of, relating to, or suggestive of the labors of Sisyphus (as in, a Sisyphean task)." Go ahead and make your knowledge checks now to see how much you know about Sisyphus. At DC 10, you know that Sisyphus was a Greek who, for his sins, was condemned in Hades to forever try to push a great boulder up a steep hill, such that as he neared the top, he would lose his grip and it would roll back down, forcing him to start again. A sisyphean task, therefore, is one which is demanding, difficult, taxing, and indeed, completely impossible and unending. At DC 15, you might know that Sisyphus was the first king of Corinth and, to all accounts, a complete bastard well-deserving of his eternal punishment. Only at relatively high DCs, though, will the average person happen to know any details of the life of Sisyphus, because his stories aren't told nearly as widely as his contemporaries. Unlike characters such as Hercules, Sisyphus' lineage traces back not to the gods, but to the titans (some stories do suggest his great-grandfather was Zeus, but more commonly he is linked to Prometheus, himself arguably a trickster-figure). Several of the women in his direct lineage, furthermore, are actually nymphs or similar spirits, from whom it's assumed that Sisyphus inherited striking beauty and charisma as well as a silver tongue. Some stories claim that Sisyphus was the father of Odysseus, though this is debated and none of those involved can be reached for comment. Obviously, tales of Sisyphus have some disagreement, but where all stories agree is that Sisyphus was one of if not the most cunning man of his era, who robbed, betrayed, seduced, and lied his way onto a throne, and by the same means gilded it and paid for a palace to build around it. Of particular relevance to the story for which he's most famous, Sisyphus is said to have once outsmarted Zeus himself (few people ever lived to do it twice).<P> Sisyphus' crime, which damned him to Tartarus, had nothing at all to do with the killing of social rivals or the seduction of family members, which was all quite acceptable by the standards of the Greek gods. Sisyphus was actually punished because, after Zeus comitted one of his many rapes (this one in the form of an eagle, if I'm not mistaken), Sisyphus told on his, getting the Thunderbolt King into a great deal of trouble and providing front-page stories for the Greek newspapers for months. In his rage, Zeus ordered Hades to bring Sisyphus to Tartarus for his proverbial own personal hell, but it is believed Sisyphus persuaded the god who captured him to show Sisyphus how the magical manacles worked by trying them on himself. Sisyphus was eventually caught and dragged to Tartarus by no less a luminary than Ares, god of war, and locked up in the punishment for which he is known. Even then, Sisyphus would escape once from the Underworld on the grounds that he had previously instructed his wife to botch his funeral rituals; he talked Persephone into letting him go so that he could go fix the error, and then, understandably, failed to return to Tartarus until caught and dragged back by the messenger god, Hermes. <P> So, who was Sisyphus? First off, let's agree he was not a good person, and certainly not one of the mythological figures we should consider worthy of direct emulation or prayer. A multiple murderer, userper, and extremely poor host at parties, few of his stories tell of him having much in the way of redeeming qualities, and he is not one of the happy, smiling, joy-and/or-wisdom kind of tricksters we sometimes read about. He's certainly no Eris, who saved the world once or twice even in her less friendly days... he isn't even a Baron Samedi, who might humiliate you and ruin your life but who at least means it all in the spirit of jolly good fun. For what he isn, though... a scheming, evil titanspawn... one has to admire his talents. This is a man who seized a kingdom (and ruled it halfway decently) and who outsmarted both the angel of death and the queen of the underworld, escaping the will of the gods no less than twice. This is furthermore a man who had the sheer chutzpah to call out the King of the Gods, a being well known to be one of the most vindictive beings in existence at the time, though we can't speak as to what Sisyphus' motivations for this were. Finally, Sisyphus is interesting because, like many of the great tricksters of mythology, his name is known but his story isn't. "Sisyphean" is a moderately common (or at least widely recognised) English word, and the punishment of Sisyphus is known to most people who have a basic familiarity with Greek myth, but the exact details of the story are known to few. Extra hugs go to the fine folks at White Wolf for giving this character his due in the Scion books. <P> As for the fate of the deceiver being eternal damnation and punishment, he still got off a good sight better than Prometheus, Oedipus, and a lot of other major Greek figures who did nasty stuff. It just goes to show that you can accomplish a lot with a silver tongue and a quick wit without accumulating too much punishment in your future. I wonder if he ever prayed at the local temple of Eris? <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; //-->