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 461-470<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/401-500/471-480.html">Entries 471-480</a><BR> <a href="#470">Entry 470</a> April 17 2008<br> <a href="#469">Entry 469</a> April 14 2008<br> <a href="#468">Entry 468</a> April 11 2008<br> <a href="#467">Entry 467</a> April 8 2008<br> <a href="#466">Entry 466</a> April 5 2008<br> <a href="#465">Entry 465</a> April 2 2008<br> <a href="#464">Entry 464</a> March 30 2008<br> <a href="#463">Entry 463</a> March 27 2008<br> <a href="#462">Entry 462</a> March 24 2008<br> <a href="#461">Entry 461</a> March 21 2008<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/451-460.html">Entries 451-460</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="470"></a> <U><B>Traffic Koans</b></u><p> Over the last few days, simply as a desperate means to read something other than physiology and pathology texts, I've spent some time reading about some philosophers I never really knew very well, and some of the less well-known thoughts of some philosophers I do know reasonably well. More on this will potentially go into one or more posts in the future, if I get any entertaining ideas or something. In the meantime, though, among other things that I was reading, I found myself doing some research on koans, and as yet another in my long line of contributions to human (and inhuman) knowledge, I thought it might be fun to sit down today and set forth some answers to some of the more famous koans that have boggled minds for centuries. It's my little gift to you, because I'm very, very clever (in addition to being a tiny bit arrogant).<P> First, a word on koans in general. Webster defines "koan" as "a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment." Understandably, I've always found this very compelling... Deliberately seeding confusion to promote wisdom? That's my whole world view right there! I'm not a Buddhist, nor do I have the temperament or set of beliefs which would ever allow me to be a good practitioner of their system, but I deeply respect many -- well, some -- of their teachings and I agree strongly that intuitive enlightenment is a powerful tool, even if I value it for much more selfish reasons than they do. In modern times, the word koan has been applied -- some say extended, some don't -- to such classic "unanswerable" questions as the chicken/egg problem and the sound of one hand clapping. I put "unanswerable" in quote marks because, of course, they're emminently answerable if one is clever enough, much as one plus one equals four if you're willing to use sufficiently large values of "one."<P> Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken. We name eggs according to what they're laid by, not what comes out of them. The proof of this is that we cook chicken eggs for food, even though most, being unfertilized, will never produce a chicken. Since we do not refer to them as null eggs, they must be getting named for their source, the chicken. The first chicken therefore hatched from, I dunno, a <I>Gallus beremendensis</i> egg or something. It would probably have been indistinguishable from its immediate ancestors, but it was, none-the-less, the first chicken. See? We started with an easy one. Post-contemplation, my grasp on reality is indeed tenuous, but I'm not sure that's the fault of the koan.<P> What is the sound of one hand clapping? Logically, there are two possible answers to this one: there is either a sound, or there is no sound, and until you know that, there isn't much point in wondering what the sound is. Webster defines "clap" as, amongst other things, "to strike (as two flat hard surfaces) together so as to produce a sharp percussive noise; to strike (the hands) together repeatedly usually in applause; to strike with the flat of the hand in a friendly way; to improvise or build hastily; to produce a percussive sound; to applaud." Certain other definitions have been omitted here, either due to redundancy or because Neisseria infections don't make a sound in and of themselves. Ancient thinkers, being of relatively little imagination, assumed that one hand clapping meant one hand clapping without the aid of another hand, but clearly one hand can clap against anything else, such as a wall, a table, a face, a brick, the Spirit of Saint Louis, and so forth. We could sit here and tease apart the subtle differentiations between all those clapping sounds, but one of Webster's definitions is, quite simply, "a loud percussive noise," and so the most obvious and most accurate answer is that the sound of one hand clapping is "clap." Why it's taken thousands of years for someone to posit this solution is beyond me... perhaps the ancient monks hadn't read Webster, and presumably made do with the Oxford English Dictionary, which doesn't offer as many different definitions of "clap" to work with.<P> It becomes apparent that most of these koans aren't so much insoluable puzzles, so much as they are a failure of monks to properly operationalize their terms. This is, perhaps, why our world has so many scientists and so few monks, though whether this is a good or bad thing is quite beyond me to judge. <P> Then there are the classical koans, which are most often told in the form of stories involving non-sequiteurs. These koans aren't so much riddles to be pondered, as they appear to show that the ancient Zen masters didn't like being roused from meditation by annoying students and gave whatever answers they felt like, confident that whatever they said would be seen as "wisdom" (in a sense, rightly so, because a wise student doesn't ask silly questions of the teacher). I'd give a lot to be able to go back in time and see the look on the faces of thede great masters as they posed their stories to their students... whether they were deathly serious, or whether they'd giggle uncontrollably when people looked confused. For these koans to acheive their purpose -- to confuse, and thus to allow for new forms of wisdom -- it doesn't really matter if the masters were composing koans in deadly earnest or with tongue firmly in cheek, because either way, the student gets confused and, if they're a good student, learns something. I think those two ends are all any good teacher really hopes for, deep down. <P> As regards any great questions I may not have addressed, I defer to the words of a very wise man, who said that the answer is FIVE TONS OF FLAX! Which is, by the way, enough flax that, should it be rendered into linseed oil and left alone, will eventually spontaneously combust with enough force to level several nearby buildings. What that has to do with anything else is, perhaps, something to be meditated upon in the hope of getting intuitively enlightened. <HR> <a name="469"></a> <U><B>Hindsight</b></u><p> Today, I've been feeling good, rested, and productive. I had a better night's sleep than I have in recent memory; I've had good food to eat; I spent several hours studying and finished an important and difficult chapter of my textbook; I even had the time to watch part of a very entertaining movie and paint about half of a miniature. So far, the day's been pretty nifty and life is good. Most days, of course, I wouldn't make a very big deal of this sort of thing, because I don't want to jinx it, but then again, some days, you really just have to tempt fate. April 14th is one of them.<P> On a related note, today my car is having its left-side rearview mirror stuck back on.<P> I'm a decent driver. I'm not a great driver, but I'm decent. I'm not a great driver because I lack confidence and I'm a terrible judge of spatial dimensions; I have a hard time being absolutely perfectly sure where I am in relation to other objects, which means I lack the courage to drive right up next to them the way other drivers do. On the other hand, because I lack confidence, I try very hard to drive extra safely, and that means that I'm a safer driver than most people on the road. I have fewer accidents per year than the average person does, statistically, and I'm certainly less of a risk to myself and others when I'm on the highway (where I may drive at ten or even twenty kilometers above the speed limit but I always use my turn signals when I change lanes and I never weave through traffic). Somehow, though, despite my being a fairly safe driver, there's this curious phenomen, wherein every year, one of my car's side rearview mirror will get smacked off. I've been driving my own car regularly for five or six years and my parents' cars once every week or two for another two or three years before that, and indeed, I've lost a side mirror about four or five times in that period. When I changed cars about one year ago, I joked that it probably wouldn't be long until it lost a mirror, and it wouldn't truly be my car until then. To my credit, I made it nearly a full year, right until the tail-end of winter, but still, it goes to show what comes of tempting fate.<P> The interesting thing, to me, is that the lost mirror is only my fault about one half of the time. I admit, that's still a good two or three times when the damage was unequivocally my own fault, and I feel very stupid for that but sitll take responsibility. The other half of the time, it isn't my fault, and at least twice I wasn't even in the car at the time, but there you go. Most people have the occasional fender-bender or even moderately serious car accident but most people I speak to say they've never lost a mirror; I've only ever had one real accident, and it was due to someone else running a light illegally, but somehow I just lose a lot of side mirrors. It really is just something of a particularly non-funny running-gag with me. <P> Take my current lost mirror, the one for which repairs are being made. Montreal had a record-breaking snowfall this year, and we had at least three snowstorms which quite literally shut down the city. Montreal doesn't shut down when we get a centimeter of snow, though, or when we get four or five centimeters. Montreal doesn't shut down until either the snow reaches knee height or so much freezing rain falls that the fire department posts men on each street corner, with guideropes linking them so that people can pull themselves along. I made it through each of those storms safely, primarily by virtue of not having had to drive anywhere during or right after them, but in the wake of those storms, numerous streets in the city were left down to a single lane in width for up to a week or more. After the third such storm, while my car was parked outside my parents' on the narrow street, somebody miscalculated distance and took of my mirror. These things happen (especially to me, it seems), so I just went out with some tape and superglue and stuck it back on. I know I'm not the only person that this happened to this year; driving through the narrow streets of my girlfriend's neighbourhood this winter, you'd always see at least two or three parked cars with broken mirrors dangling from the side. I don't much care what happens to other people, though, certainly not in the face of it happening to me. That's fate for you.<P> Why do we mark Tempting Fate Day on our calendars? Because of things like this. Fate's a jerk and the Universe is the biggest bastard there is (in more ways than one). Every day, into every life, a little bit of ironic pain and suffering falls, and in my case, it's when somebody who means no harm at all smacks off one of my rearview mirrors one cold winter's day. We mark Tempting Fate Day so that, one day a year, we laugh back. We point, laugh, and mock fate, because the rest of the year, it mocks us. It's a small, petty vengence, but it feels good, like the feeling when the glue hardens and your side-view mirror is safely re-attached. For those of you who have never had to manually reattached a snapped-off mirror using cyanoacrilate and duct tape, you'll just have to take my word for it that it feel good.<P> Yes, Fate. I'm laughing at you. I'm laughing right at you, you stupid, annoying, bothersome meddling anthropomorphized abstract concept. I'm laughing right at you and there's nothing yuo can do about it that you wouldn't have anyway. I'm laughing right in your metaphorical face. And I will next year, too... unless you're standing just behind and to the left of my car, in which case I might not be able to see you. <HR> <a name="468"></a> <U><B>Bah!</b></u><p> The <I>Codex Dolosus</i> has this to say about humbugs. The Humbug, it says, is a rare species of the Coccinellidae family, native to the Brittish isles and related to the common ladybug. This brightly coloured insect is a relatively predatory species, subsisting mostly on smaller insects, and in fact is usually considered to be a boon to farmers for its tendency to consume smaller, crop-eating insects. Like other species of ladybug, the humbug uses aposematic colouring to warn lizards and birds not to eat it. In actual fact, the humbug is non-poisonous, unlike most species of Coccinellidae, and its bright colouring might more properly be considered to be Batesian mimicry rather than true aposematism. The humbug does share the common ladybug's ability to bleed on command; the humbug's hemolymph is foul-smelling but is not toxic, unlike most Coccinellidae, and is useful to dissuade predation. The <I>Codex</i> further suggests that it is because all of the humbug's defensive evolutionary adaptations being based on trickery and deceit that the word "humbug" has come to be synonymous with lies, trickery, and natural health products.<P> Webster's dictionary defines "humbug" as "1a: something designed to deceive and mislead b: a willfully false, deceptive, or insincere person. 2: an attitude or spirit of pretense and deception. 3: nonsense, drivel. 4: a hard, usually mint-flavored candy." It traces the word's usage in this way back to the mid 1700's, though it states that the word's origin is unknown. The word in common parlance was, of course, made famous by Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge, who has been portrayed making use of this catch-phrase countless times on stage and film, perhaps most masterfully by the great actor Rowan Atkinson. In Dickens' <I>Christmas</i> carol, Scrooge refers to Christmas as being a humbug, specifically using the word to express his disgust at what he perceives as a wilfull and deliberate misleading of the public; he does not, as most readers believe, simply shout a random, non-sensical word, unless of course he is assumed to be responding to every cheerful "merry Christmas" by shouting "mint-flavored candy!" In fact, Scrooge's decrying of Christmas as a humbug -- an act of humbuggery, if you will -- might be considered to be his own attempt at a noble and charitable act, as he tries to free people from being deceived. The fact that his efforts meet with dismal failure even before he changes his ways just goes to show that Oscar Wilde was right: The secret to enjoying life truly is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived.<P> Bah, unlike humbug, is not a word rich in meaning and subtle poetry. Webster defines it simply as "used to express disdain or contempt" and dates it to the 1600's. Scrooge may not have been crazy for shouting "humbug" but there is, apparently, no excuse for him bahing.<P> As an odd historical sidenote, the word "humbug" appears in L. Frank Baum's classic "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and is applied, quite understandably, to the Wizard himself. Interestingly, it is the Scarcrow who uses the word -- impressive, given that his complaint up until that point was that he lacked a brain, and one wold think he wouldn't have the vocabulary. Even more amusing, of course, is the Wizard's response:<BR> <blockquote> "I'm just a common man."<BR> "You're more than that," said the Scarecrow, in a grieved tone; "you're a humbug."<BR> "Exactly so!" declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him.<BR> </blockquote> The <I>Codex Dolosus</i> goes on to suggest that "humbug" may be one of the finest and most beautiful of the many words of deceit, in so far as countless people know and use the word approximately correctly without having any inkling of what it actually refers to. Such a phenomenon, the <I>Codex</i> argues, is precisely the state in which a word such as humbug should exist; when common people use the word "humbug" it is, in fact, an instance of humbugging. <HR> <a name="467"></a> <U><B>Binky The Snowdemon</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> Once is a fluke. Twice is a pattern. Three times is a tradition. Four begins to look like carelessness. <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, The Traditions of The Penguin, chapter 1, verses 1 through 4. </blockquote></i><P> <left> I like playing in the snow. In many ways, the snow is my environment -- I have naturally good balance in it, often better than I balance on dry stone, and I endure its icy touch better than most people. In particular, I'm optimally adapted to thrive in the sorts of snows that we in Montreal get every April, when the temperature hovers around five or ten degrees and fresh snow falls but melts away rapidly. It's the kind of snow that my ancestors in Russia and Poland lived with for months, and it's no shock that they evolved to thrive in it. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that three hundred years ago, a young Chaimeleh Lis would go out every day and play in the snow right around noo, in the quiet time between chores, because the blood of Veles ran in his veins, hot chicken soup was in his belly, and a thousand ideas for snowmen clamored in his head, trying to get out. I probably wouldn't have liked the little schnook very much and he certainly wouldn't like me, but we'd respect one thing about each other: our mutual love of building Stuff out of snow.<P> Recorded evidence of my snow sculptures goes back to the winter of 2003. I say "recorded evidence" because that was the first year that I decided to catch my scultpure on film, and indeed, grainy, low-quality pictures of Frosty the Hutt still sit on my computer where I can go back and see them if I ever want to. Frosty the Hutt was an important transition point for me in terms of snow art, because it was the first year that I made a concerted effort to make a real snow sculpture look halfway decent. The fact that I shaped it into a Hutt started off as pure pragmatism -- it's much easier to make a big worm-creature than a legged humanoid when you're working with snow -- but it was at that time that I discovered the joy of what would become something I really I love: snowdemons. I built my first snowdemon -- at least, the first one I took pictures of -- in 2004, and since then I've built at least one snowdemon every year (taking pictures of three of the four to prove it). Last year, I built my annual snowdemon on April 14th, immortalizing the event with a post on this very Journal, and this year, I built another one on April 5th. In both cases, the reason was the same: it was warm enough out to play outside without a jacket, there was lot of very wet and melty snow, and I had nothing better to do for an hour or so. To be honest, those three criteria figure pretty prominently in my every vision of Heaven.<P> So I says to myself, I says, I've been building the same basic snowdemon once a year for four years, each year making it a little bigger and a little more elaborate... it's time I gave it a name. I called it Binky.<P> Binky the Snowdemon came into existence on December 9, 1608, in a little corner of a minor Slavic underworld. Long forgotten by the adherents of any faith in existence, the demons living in this underworld had mellowed over the years, and were at the time little more than mischevous imps rather than inefarious malefactors. Binky came to be when a newly-deceased human soul sank down into the underworld and merged with the snows at a crossroads in the center of a graveyard at the stroke of midnight on October 29th... had it been a day or two later, the ultimate force of evil would surely have awoken, but instead awoke Binky. It took Binky some years to become active, as he was by nature a sluggish and slothful demon, but he went to demongarten with the other young demon, learning to write and spell, and went on to grade school and high school, where he became fascinated with demon history, and particularly the long and slow decline most demon nations had seen in the preceeding centuries as humanity had grown into arrogance and stupdity all on its own. Binky entered college, pursuing a degree in demanthropology, and earned accolades from the other demons for his ToD thesis, "Why We Suck." Determined to turn around the fortunes of demonkind, Binky hatched a plan to have himself summoned to Earth, where he could unleash Unspeakable Evil and some really annoying cold weather on the world at large, thus restoring humanity's fear of That Which Lurks Below. Sadly for Binky, he was a very slow typist and not particularly fast at much of anything else, and by the time he obtained his doctorate nearly four hundred years had passed and demonic influence had gotten so minimal as to be non-existent. <P> Binky's plan was this: to conquer the world through an army of snowmen. It would be difficult to do, given the ambient temperature for most of the year in most of the world, but snow was the only element through which Binky could work and even to conquer a small Northern village or two would be more than any other demon had accomplished in decades. First, Binky would have to find a mind through which he could channel himself into the world. He found a mind, strong enough to pierce the walls of reality and whimsical enough to go play in the snow, and sent his image to that mind. Binky's plan worked, to a point. His body was slowly and painstakingly shaped. A vast conical body grew from the snow, and from its mass sprouted six vile tentacles, each ending in a horrid serrated pincer or a mighty crushing hammer fist. Atop the conical body, two sharp and vicious hors sprouted, wickedly curved to stab and eviscerate, and below them, two dark and cruel eyes and a lipless, fang-filled gaping maw. Binky's plans had failed to take a single factor into account: having been constructed by a mere humanoid in a short half-hour's work, his body was less than a foot tall and so poorly shaped that the slightest movement would send one of his tentacles plummeting to the ground. This would not do, this would not do at all, but Binky was patient, and could wait. Into the open mind he sent a suggestion that each year he should be built anew, and each year he should be larger, mightier, and more fearsome. it would be only a matter of time, Binky knew, before he was razing and pillaging across the face of the world.<P> And so, each year, Binky is built again and again. Each year his shape is better defined. Last year Binky was two full feet in height; this year, counting his long serpentine tail, he was nearly four feet and heavily muscled. Recent years have seen him reduced from six tentacles to only four, but those four are stronger, long, and more vicious than ever before. Recently, he has begun manifesting along with his own six-inch tall snowcultists, two last year and three this year, ready to do his bidding and increase his already frosty powers with their devotions. At this rate, Binky may feel his body is ready to come to life and assault humanity any year now, though likely not for at least three or four years. Cunning as he is, however, Binky has not yet planned for all contingencies. Coming from a realm of ice and snow, Binky has only a poor understanding of the concept of warmth; he understands that much of Earth is too hot to support snowy life, but has not yet grasped the idea of spring thaws. Each year, Binky's new and ever-dealier body is built in April on a day when the tempratures are well above zero... even if Binky does finally become big and strong enough to awaken and begin his rampage, he will surely travel less than fifty feet before too much of his mass has melted and dripped away. For now, at least, humanity is safe.<P> For now. I'll almost certainly build him again next winter, and who knows what'll happen? <HR> <a name="466"></a> <U><B>Whatsoever Goeth Upon His Paws</b></u><p> There are a number of books which it pleases me to have copies of on my computer, should I want to see them. First and foremost among these books are roleplaying sourcebooks, which I might use only once in my life and so aren't worth the forty or fifty dollars it would cost to buy the physical copies. Then there are the books which i love and so enjoy having in a version I can read at the computer and easily copy text from, including the Princess Bride and Good Omens. There are books I would simply never be able to find in physical form, such as rare first printings of The Principia Discordia. And then there are books which I keep around specifically so that i can use a wordprocessor's wordsearch function to navigate rapidly through them. This category includes all five books of the Hitchhiker's Guide, because when you need a rapid Guide quote, that's the best wat to get it. It includes the Lord Of The Rings, which I've used as reference material many times and which, having only read once, I couldn't possibly navigate by scanning page after page to find one phrase I'm trying to remember. And finally, I keep a copy of the Bible -- new and old testmanet -- on my computer as word-searchable PDF, because I often need to look through the Bible to support one argument or another and being able to find specific words quickly is very useful in a three thousand and eighty page document. And so, thanks to the miracle of word search, I can say with authority that, barring certain expected variations in translation, the word "weasel" occurs only once in the entire old and new Testament. <P> You begin to see why I never became a religious Jew. I couldn't possibly be part of a faith that has so little emphasis on weasels.<P> Specifically, we turn to the Old Testament, book of Leviticus, chapter 11. This incredibly dull and uninteresting chapter deals with what animals are and are not kosher and, indeed, in some cases, what animals are so unclean that even touching them requires that one be ritually purified afterwards. Verse twenty seven speaks of "whatsoever goes upon his paws" which is suitably vague, saying that their carcasses are unclean, that anyone handling their carcasses are unclean, that any dish their carcass touches must be purified and that if they touch your oven, the over must be dissasembled and never used again. The only thing which doesn't become unclean if touched by a dead weasel is any hole which contains "plenty of water" because this was a desert culture, and any water is good water in the face of death by dehydration. The real fun is verse 29, where rather than simply citing animals with paws, the book specifically names weasels. This isn't our usual "all long furry animals look the same" situation, either, because in the very next verse we learn that ferrets are equally unclean... whoever wrote this book really knew how to differentiate mustelid species. Fortunately, a careful reading of the text suggests that contact with such unlean animals is only forbidden after they're dead, which means that there's apparently no holy prohibition against keeping them as pets (although when they die, their cage has to be thrown out and you may have to visit the mikveh. <P> The word "penguin" does not appear in the Bible. Arguably, I suppose this means that they're kosher. Still, it's a poor holy book that doesn't have any penguins.<P> I suppose this begs the question, why did the Bible consider it necessary to specifically cite weasels as being unkosher? Was it common to see Isrealites running pell-mell across the desert, chasing weasels for their dinner? Probably, not, since the average weasel is barely a mouthful, and furthermore, the averaeg weasel is much more likely to gouge out both of a human's eyes before it gets caught and eaten, and even further furthermore the Isrealites of the day were on a steady diet of manna to begin with. In all likelihood, the prohibition against eating weasels was more a question of foresight; a fully mature weasel is far too likely to kill a man if it gets chased, and since they were about to try to conquer the promised land, they couldn't afford to lose men like that, especially given the loss of life already incurred from Isrealite soldiers hungrily chasing fast-moving desert birds off of cliffs by mistake. The Bible couldn't take the chance of losing this many men to simple attrition, so a lot of animals got listed as being unkosher simply to keep people from hunting them. It's no coicidence that pretty much the only animals which are kosher are slow-moving, relatively stupid animals which had already been domesticated, non-flying birds, or species of small, harmless, non-carnivorous fish.<P> The other good question which this begs is, given that these people still considered spears and shields to be the height of scientific advancement, who was it who sat down and worked out the speciation between ferrets and weasels? Aside from size difference, which isn't even that reliable, even I have trouble telling the two apart. Of course, the ancient isrealites trying to differentiate them were no doubt more in touch with nature and more concious of differences between animals than I am, and perhaps details and subtleties which I have to search for, they found obvious and striking, just like every flower looks the same to me, but on the other hand, if their interests were limited solely to who was going to eat who, I don't think they'd have my fine appreciation for the differences they'd perceived. <P> <blockquote> Ehud: Hey, Moishe, do you think that's a weasel or a ferret?<BR> Moishe: I think it's a weasel. Look at the shape of its tail. What do you think, Benny?<BR> Benny: AARRRGH, IT'S LATCHED ONTO MY FACE! GET IT OF ME! GET IT OFF ME!<P></blockquote> And that's why weasels aren't mentioned more times in the Bible: they'd steal the show. Who would care about prophets and judges when the weasels were clearly the most interesting characters in the book? <HR> <a name="465"></a> <U><B>Happy Penguinday!</b></u><p> I noticed today that when I posted the last Entry, I uploaded it as normal to my own website and then promptly forgot to put it onto the Livejournal mirror, which means it also didn't get crossposted to Facebook. Let me assure everyone that it was written and posted on time on the only site that really matters. If you were wondering why there was no post three days ago, let this be a lesson to you that the best place to read this really is off of aericanempire.com, where the design is nicer, the archive is more convenient, and there are more weasles.<P> So anyway...<P> April first, perhaps quite appropriately, was recently deemed to be the birthday of my pet stuffed penguin, Penguin. This decision was not made by myself, since I don't habitually assign birthdays to my stuffed toys on the grounds that I don't know when they were manufactured and usually can't even recall when they were purchased, and mostly just celebrate them on Inanimate Objects Day every year. I'm not the only person who has a current interest in my penguin, however, and so one of these other fine folks decided that it needed a birthday, and picked April first more or less arbitrarily. I certainly didn't have any objection, though I don't see why the penguin needed one; I usually only see the point of celebrating the birthday of someone who gets excited by it themselves. In any case, my penguin's birthday was yesterday, and it was duly celebrated, and the whole situation seems fine to me. As part of the ongoing celebrations, today's post is in honour of my penguin, who deserves to be honoured more than most humans I know.<p> Penguin (sometimes known as Squeeshee, though never by me) began life humbly, presumably mass-produced in a third-world factory. I say presumably because the truth is I don't recall where Penguin was made, and no tags remain attached to its body to tell the story. No one knows how old Penguin is; I know that it was purchased years ago, when I was still young enough that I went shopping with my mother, but can't remember the exact year. I was at The Bay (a major local department store chain, for the benefit of non-Canadians reading this) and buying clothes, which always makes me annoyed, frustrated, and homicidal. We were wandering through the aisles, having a generally lousy time, and were just passing tangential to some other department -- probably baby stuff, but a part of me seems to recall bed furnishings. I noticed a pile of stuffed toys hanging from hooks along one wall. The vast majority of the stuffed toys present were plush versions of Caillou, a French cartoon character of no great importance, but for reasons which I will never know and know better than to question, amongst the two or three dozen humanoids was a single stuffed penguin. Not just any ordinary penguin, but a penguin in a little red hat and bow-tie. I walked over and admired it briefly, because this was a penguin exceeding Tux levels of cuteness and squishyness. It wasn't, in fact, a stuffed toy per se, but rather a novelty pillow (which might explain why it was in bed furnishings rather than the toy section), and the brand name on the tag, if memory serves me, was Pillow Buddies, a line which I have never ever been able to learn anything about, and about which it seems no trace of information still exists. To my eternal shame, I was actually going to not buy this penguin, because it cost some ridiculous amount of money (probably only about fifteen or twenty dollars, good price for a two-foot tall stuffed toy [or, for that matter, a pillow] but more than I can usually justify paying for such things). My mother, in an act for which I will be eternally grateful, actually spent a full thirty seconds persuading me that it was worth it. I left home a young boy... I returned home a young boy with a pet stuffed penguin. Granted, it wasn't, perhaps, a rebirth-level event, but it proved to be a good move.<P> In the years which followed -- however many of them there were -- my penguin proved to be a fine companion. As plush toys go, it was squishy and huggable even beyond reasonable expectations, and though I was sure that the poorly-sewn bowtie would fall off within weeks, it's still firmly attached to this day. Its black has gotten a bit less black and its white has gotten a it less white, but its hat is still bright red and it still smiles at me every day. This is more than I can say for a lot of the animate friends I've had over the years. When I moved to my apartment, my penguin was among the items transferred with the greatest ceremony; it was, in some ways, the closest thing I had to a roommate, even if it does sleep on a couch in the living room.<P> Today, Penguin is something ubiquitous and immediately apartment when one walks into ym appartment. The penguin is perhaps not the very first thing people see when they walk in, but only because it's competing with a three foot by six foot Aerican flag with a two foot diameter smiley face in the center. The second thing people see is the life-sized plush penguin in a red top hat, and quite appropriately, it tends to draw more comments (if fewer stares). My penguin sits in a place of honour, always getting first choice of seats in my living room and occasionally even displacing humans when there isn't enough space on the couch for both. Once or twice, a human has actually asked me why the penguin was treated as if it was more important than them, to which I responded: if you have to ask whether you or a stuffed penguin are more important, it isn't you.<P> So, happy arbitrary/artificial birthday to my penguin. I look forward to celebrating it many times in the future, be it on April first or any other day of the year. When you've got a stuffed penguin that's as wonderful as mine, you celebrate it every day of the year. It's not every stuffed toy that e-mails you to remind you that its birthday is coming up, after all. <HR> <a name="464"></a> <U><B>I Am The Law</b></u><p> <blockquote> <I>This is my law, which I have given to you, and if you obey this law... no, wait, if you obey these two laws... no, *three* la- FOUR! Four laws! <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, The Last Chapter You Would Expect. </blockquote></i><P> <left> One of the most curious activities in my life is writing laws.<P> Here I am, a lover of chaos and a spreader of confusion. I don't like rules and I make a point of breaking a few every day, just to be sure that Order doesn't get too full of itself. I actively work to spread disorder and discord around me, because, I suppose, that's just the sort of person I am. I like it when stuff that's supposed to be rightside up spends a little bit of its time upside down. After years and years of playing Dungeons and Dragons, I've only ever learned a tiny fraction of the rules and the game mechanics, because I don't want that kind of stuff in my head; it's yucky and sticky, and it gets into your synapses and makes you think about things you can and can't do. Me, I respect rules, I appreciate their necessity, I want to have just enough of them in place that people who are bigger than me don't beat me up and take my stuff, but I when you get right down to it I don't really like them, and I think the world would be a better place if we didn't need them (or, more accurately, if everyone was less of an idiot, so we wouldn't need rules to make them act sensibly towards each other).<P> And yet, here I sit, writing a constitution. Not merely setting down laws, but setting down *procedures*. Procedures by which news laws can be made, to place further limit on beautiful, beautiful chaos. laws which limit my own personal powers and which put limits on what I personally can and can't do. Something seems wrong with this.<P> In my capacity as Emperor of a small country, I have the responsibility to make sure that my country works properly. If I want it to function -- and if I want it to outlive me, which is perhaps what I want second most of all in the whole world -- then it needs laws and, yes, even procedures. I'm all for chaos on a purely theoretical level, but practically speaking, you need a certain amount of laws and rules to ensure that everybody knows where it's best for them to stand and who's in line for what ob. It's important, for example, for a government to know the process of creating laws, because laws are important and, more importantly, can actually be a lot of fun if they're made by people who have a bit of a sense of humour and a keen enlightened self-interest. Much as I adore the Goddess, my true worship goes first and foremost to Forsteri, who is, of course, a god of balance... chaos is fine and good, but it can't exist without some law, to keep things running smoothly enough to make time for chaos to be appreciated. The idea of someone like myself sitting down and actively inventing new laws is pretty odd, but the price of being an Emperor is that you have to take a direct sort of hand in these things.<P> Besides, if I didn't do it, who else would? The Empire truly has grown beyond me in the last decade, but I'm still the one best positioned and most motivated to make the changes that keep it growing and improving. And so, here I sit, writing laws. The Goddess would no doubt be cross with me, but fortunately, She's easily distractable, and Her ire will probably be forgotten by the time I reach the end of this sentence.<P> To be honest -- and this is one of my dirty little secrets, for those of you who want to take notes -- there's a little part of me that enjoys making laws. I blame my hyperactive frontal lobe -- the same part of me that makes me imaginative and deceitful has an intrinsic love of order, patterns, and rules. When rules are kept in their place, I like them, in much the same way that I like learning but I don't like spending ten hours sitting in a lecture hall. I love chaos, much as I like poodles and terriers but not timber wolves. When rules serve a purpose and help things run well, they're good rules and I approve of them, and those are the kinds of rules I strive to create within the Empire. I spend a long time tonight working on the Empire's constitution because the job needed doing; the old one didn't work and prevented good changes from being made, rather than facilitating them (and equally importantly, it wasn't very well written by my modern standards). The new version will, I hope, better allow rules and laws to change and evolve as needed -- facilitating growth and creation, which is chaos in its most beautiful form -- and also better describes how laws should be made and how various individuals contribute to the process, which is the ideal purpose of imposing order on a system, guiding people towards an end rather than forcing them. if I do my job right, there's a good and healthy balance between order and chaos in the final product, and just as important as working towards the balance, my time and energy constitute a step towards an ever more functional and mighty Empire. <P> In most situations, I think that my life would be better with fewer rules and more chaos, thoguh of course, this has to be qualified with a caveat: I'm an intelligent and ethical person capable of conditioning in the enlightened anarchy, perhaps not philosopher-king material, but only because I'd never be able to manage the two years of gym class and ten years of mathematics. I could subsist in a society without rules, and wouldn't abuse the people around me. I don't believe for a second that most people are the same, though... There's Plato, but then there's Malthus and Hardin. Basically, I suppose I want all the rules to apply to everybody else and none of them to apply to me, and maybe that's why I'm sitting here writing my own constitution instead of obeying someone else's. <HR> <a name="463"></a> <U><B>Teamsters</b></u><p> I don't play well with others. Metaphorically speaking. <P> One of the mroe oft repeated lessons they try to teach us in my program is the importance of teamwork. These days, no physician can work on his or her own, without support of various specialists and experts, professionals in multiple fields, and in the case of students, other students. Take, for example, my current two-week rotation through the neurology department of the Montreal General Hospital. Unlike my time in surgery, when I was mostly a lone student accompanying a doctor, I'm now just one member of a group of five students. Our grades don't depend on each other and there's no group work per se -- I could conceivably go two weeks without ever speaking to any of them, and indeed, from past experience I know that that's well within my capabilities -- but we attend lectures togetehr each morning, we have to work out amongst ourselves each day who's going to go to the clinics and who's going to walk the wards, and today, in an act which is mostly unprecendented, I actually joined my colleagues and ate lunch with them. I did this for primarily selfish reasons -- my group was planning to meet over lunch to discuss how we were going to split up the afternoon activities, and so I was more or less obligated to join them -- but in part I wanted to actually go with them, sit with them, and see if I could be one of them. I'm a versatile gamer and a consummate deceiver, and in theory I should be able to play any role I want, but in practice, being social with my classmates has never worked out. To my credit, I did actually contribute to the conversation a couple of times, though I can't say I was the utterly charming and witty person I am when I'm among my actual friends.<P> It's a small tragedy that after nearly two years I didn't have any *real* friends at the table with me. This isn't due to my having a shortage of classmates that I like, but simply due to the fact that they're all currently at different hospitals than I am. Them's the breaks. So anyway...<P> The really curious bit came after lunch, as we were divvying up the activities. It was a slow day in the neurology department, and to put it bluntly, there was nothing much for us to do; the clinics were mostly unmanned and the residents had finished their work, leaving them with nothing interesting to show us. If we had stayed to wait for two or three hours, our attending staff supervisor would return and there was a moderate chance that he would have some patients to talk to us about, but even that was likely to have limited space, and there were a number of us trying to decide what to do with our time. I am, of course, a selfless and generous soul, so with great nobility and reluctance, I allowed my colleagues to take my place at the fternoon activities and went home early to play videogames. As I was getting ready to leave, though, my classmates raised the question of whether it was appropriate for one of us to leave early. I tried to understand their logic, but I was left very unsure whether they were sugegsting that 1) we're a team, so it's not really appropriate for one of us to go home early, and so I should stay or 2) we're a team, so it's not really appropriate for only one of us to go home early, so if I leave other people get to go home too. I tried to understand, really I did, but the truth is, as soon as words like "teamwork" start floating around, my eyes sort of glaze over, much the same way that they do when people around me start discussing advanced mathematics. There are just some topics my respectably remarkable mind can't wrap itself around, and teamwork is one.<P> There is no "I" in team. On the other hand, there is a "me" and there is decidedly no "u". There's also "meat" and "tea" which, coicidentally and broadly speaking, are amongst my favourite foods. While we're on the topic, there are "I"s in alliance, coalition, combination, confederation, federation, union, conspiracy, syndicate, faction, association, organization, affiliation, cooperative, and partnership. None of these words have "x"s, "z"s or "q"s but I don't know if that proves anything.<P> I like to think I'm a good person in the "group work" situation. I may not be sociable, but when I'm in a group project, I always complete my part early and with quality, because I wouldn't want anyone else to have to suffer for having worked with me, and more than once I've carried a group project to sucessful completion when classmates and coworkers were, and let's not mince words, incompetent. The hospital "teamwork" dynamic seems to be something subtly different, though. We aren't evaluated together, and in point of fact, there's no "work" for us to do. None the less, in the eyes of many of my classmates, the mere fact that we're assigned to the same area seems to imply that we're united into a sort of cohesive unit, a number of persons associated together in work or activity, two or more draft animals harnessed to the same vehicle or implement. Somehow, whether or not I eat lunch on my own or whether or not I leave early appears to affect how I'm seen to exist within this "team" in ways which I'm woefully ill-equipped to understand, which is a shame, because the people in my group are nice people and, more importantly, potentially useful future contacts to be exploited. I'd like to be friends with them, and I'd like to be able to work with them within the team context... if only I had more than a vague notion of what that means.<P> Fortunately, I'm not too worried. I'm reasonably certain that I didn't actually offend any of my colleagues by leaving early, and in point of fact, it might have been my show of leadership and initiative that allowed one or more of them to also go home early. On the small chance that I did give the impression that I'm a poor team-player -- which is, of course, wholly accurate, at least given this particular instance of "team" -- then I've still got a week to make up for it and demonstrate for them my utter niftiness. I should make an effort to have lunch with them again, and perhaps even summon up the courage to chat pleasantly and make small talk (or else ensure that the conversation gets steered towards stuff I can talk about about more easily). I should be at the forefront of our activities and make myself present and helpful to people. I should make a show of staying late at least twice in the next week so that they think I have a better work ethic. I should, I suppose, pretend to be normal and pretend that I like them and care about them, and who knows, maybe once I get to know them, I actually will care about them somewhat. <P> "To thine own self be true." Bah, humbug. <HR> <a name="462"></a> <U><B>To Roll In, Cover or Invade</b></u><p> In recent days, I've been listening to the work of the great composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, a French Jew who lived in the 1800's (roughly one generation after Mozart, Beethoven and the like) and is moderately well-known for his piano concertos. What makes Alkan noteworthy -- and obscure -- is that his cocnertos are among the most complex pieces of music ever written. If you were to ask one of today's famous pianists, they would tell you that an Alkan concerto is a piece of near unsurpassed beauty and wonder, but that it's orders of magnitude more difficult to learn and play than most any other composer. During the course of a single piece, for example, there might be multiple portions where twelve separate notes are called for at once, such that in theory, to play the piece properly, a pianist would have to have twelve fingers. He sounds, in short, like my kind of composer. The complexity that makes him noteworthy is what makes him obscure; few pianists can play his music, and to most audiences, his music is strange and confusing, and crowds of people in the mid 1800's, hearing him for the first time after being raised on his predecessors, were shocked and ouraged that such material was called "music" and left in droves.<P> When I first heard of Alkan, I immediately downloaded a number of his works, including those performed by Hamelin, which seem to be widely considered among the finest modern recordings. The music was tricky to find in comparison to most classical music composers, where the challenge is sorting through the huge number of matches to any search attempt; it was easy to find a good selection of recordings, but there were far fewer than if I'd looked for, say Mozart. I listened to the first few pieces with great intherest and enthusiasm, which rapidly became slight enthusiasm and then boredom. It was just as I'd suspected: to the uneducated musical ear, he sounds just like every other piano concerto, just with more notes per second. I don't know if someone who actually understands and appreciates music -- or, for that matter, mathematics -- might appreciate Alkan more, but to me, it's just normal piano music, and not particularly interesting piano music at that. I do think that perhaps I might enjoy some of his other works, works which I wasn't able to find online, including Marcia Funebre Sulla Morte d'un Pappagallo (which translates as "Funeral March on the Death of a Parrot"). <P> Oddly, this parallels another conversation I was having with a friend just the other day, about schools of painting. We were discussing Mannerism, one of the major schools, profoundly influenced by the Italian Great Masters such as Davinci. In Mannerism, the painter tries to paint an accurate depiction of the subject matter, but does so while trying to make playful use of space -- the painter includes optical illusions plaing with distance and draws most if not all human figures slightly out of proportion in different ways. Mannerism is actually one of the most widely-known schools of painting, though most people don't realise it. A significant number of the famous painters from 1500-1700 practices Mannerism, which includes Boticelli's "The Birth of Venus" and some of the famous and even iconic paintings of saints and Greek myths which get reprinted in encyclopedias and textbooks each year. When I look at a Mannerist painting, though, I see absolutely nothing which distinguishes it from, say, Renaissance or Baroque. To my credit, I *can* distinguish Mannerism from International Gothic, but only because paintings done in International Gothic style look, to me, pretty much like stick figures. Obviously, I've never taken an art history class in my life, having done a series of science degrees while nearly every single one of my friends persuded diplomas in the Liberal Arts, and so here I find myself, able to understand the intricacies of genetic engineering, cancer, mental illness, and the Caramilk secret but unable to appreciate Jacopo Tintoretto's Last Supper or, indeed, Alkan's Les quatre âges.<P> Look at me: I'm a phlistine.<P> I'd like to appreciate art. Truly, I would. I'd like to be able to sit and read a poem and appreciate the subtle imagery, the beautiful flow of the lines, the clever use of pacing, and the deep and hidden meaning which gives insight into the poet's soul and the human condition. I'd like to be able to look at a painting and have some clue why the heck it matters if Jesus is in the exact center, or off to one side by a few inches. And, yes, I'd like to be able to listen to a piece of music and not only identify when the key changes from A to E but also have some inkling why I should care. I think that there's a wealth of artistic depth and meaning out there which I'm utterly failing to appreciate, and that somehow, the fact that I can't perceive this meaning detracts from how much beauty I get out of life.<P> And then, as despair threatens to overtake me, I look up and there's a stuffed weasel gazing at me adoringly, and suddenly I don't care very much if the pianist has twelve fingers or thirty. Beauty's all in the eye of the beholder anyway. There's no shame in my favourite composer being John Williams and there's no dishonour in my favourite painter being Alex Ross. I don't look for deeper meaning in art, not because I'm uneducated, but because I don't want to find it. When I read my favourite book, I don't want to contemplate how it's a clever parody of some sociopolitical crisis from the forties... I want to be entertained by clever dialogue and exploding robots. I'm boorish and shallow and I'm proud of it, and if I want to find depth and meaning hidden in comic books instead of centuries-old paintings then that's what I'll find beautiful, and better yet, a new painting gets released every month. <P> The classics are overrated anyway. They haven't got enough weasels. <HR> <a name="461"></a> <U><B>News Of My death...</b></u><p> March has been something of a rough month for geekdom. On March 4th of this year, Gary Gygax, primary creator of Dungeons and Dragons, family man, artist, author, and real mensch passed away due to complications of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. Now, just days ago, Arthur C. Clarke of Space Odyssey fame died of respiratory disease. These two men -- both respected authors, both in their own way visionaries who took great steps in changing popular culture -- leave remarkable legacies and some of the world's finest and geekiest minds mourning their loss.<P> I noticed, however, a curious phenomenon regarding their deaths, and specifically, the way in which news of it spread. When Clarke died, it made international news; I heard the report on CBC radio, prime-time, as one of their headline news items. When Gary Gygax died, I heard about it from friends and webcomic writers. Here's the thing, though. It's hard to compare these two men seriously because Clarke was an internationally-reknowned scientist and writer, creator of one of the most famous films in history, and so influential a man that not only were stellar bodies named after him, but popular culture has adopted some of his sayings as "Clarke's laws." In comparisson, Gygax was practically a nobody; his fame is non-existent outside of one small sub-culture, his novels never sold very widely, the only movies with have his name attached are terrible, and his single contribution of society was to create a game which is all but synonymous with "loser." A lot of people, I'm sure, would take personal offense at the idea that I would dare to link these two men together in an article, because they would say that it demeans Clarke to compare him to "some guy who wrote games." And yet, news of Clarke's death reached me via a major news program -- one which as a general rule I never listen to, and which I heard only because my mother, with whom I was having dinner, wanted the radio on. If not for that, then three days days later, I still wouldn't have heard about it, and in fact, when I heard the story, my first thought was that I thought he'd been dead for years. When Gygax died -- who wasn't internationally famous, who's never written an Oscar-winning movie, and who has no layers of the atmosphere named after him -- I heard about it, within hours, from at least four different sources, and for days I couldn't go online without finding an essay in his honour or a comic-strip in memoriam (every single one of them both touching *and* funny). I'm prepared to wager right now that there are people who will read this Entry between March 21st and 24th who knew that Gygax had died and felt the loss but hadn't heard about Clarke and will meet the news with, at most, a sympathetic "meh."<P> A word about Clarke's Laws, while we're at it it. I don't mean to lessen Clarke at all by any of the above; I'm not a fan of his work, but I have tremendous respect for his scientific contributions and his astounding vision and foresight. There's no doubt that in his life he accomplished far more impressive and stirring things than Gary Gygax. While multiple Laws have been attributed to Clarke, my two favourite are his second and third, which have been immortalized in numerous sources, and rightly so. His third law is my favourite, and it reads, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." His second law, which I find much less witty and amusing but which is certainly more apt to my own life, reads "The only way to discover the limits of the possible, is to go beyond them, into the impossible." Clarke was a genius, an incredible man, and in many ways a wise thinker, but I still wouldn't have heard about his death any time soon, and I have yet to see any equally touching tributes written about him (I'm sure they'll be printed, but they haven't been written nearly as quickly and impressively as those for Mr. gygax). To be wholly honest, not only did I hear about Gygax faster, he's the one I cared more about. <P> What impact has the deaths of these fine men had on my life? Aside from the fact that they gave me fodder for a thousand words and some amusing webcomics to read, not much. I mean, yes, it's always sad when somebody dies -- moreso perhaps for Gygax, who died at less than the age of seventy from a preventable cause than Clarke who died at ninety -- but the actual impact on my life is almost nil. I haven't read Gygax's later novels or game supplements or read or watched any of Clarke's later works, and I almost certainly wasn't going to get exposed to any of their future works had they lived. From that point of view, the fact that they're dead, doesn't actually matter all that much in terms of my daily life. Why, then, should it be made a big deal of at all? People die every day in the world, many of them famous enough that I could actually hear about it (but few of them so famous that I care). I suppose we make a big deal out of it, not because we lose the contributions they might have made to our lives, but because of the ones they already did. We don't mourn them, so much as we take the convenient excuse of their being in the news one last time so that we can say some nice things about them. In my case, I also like being able to take a moment to acknowledge the Nifty Stuff they've brought to my life (which is why the deaths of so few celebrities actually catches my attention for more than the duration of a single firing neuron). When you get right down to it, I don't really care that either of these men are dead, but it is a handy time for me to say "I liked them, their politics, their famous quotes, and their books." There are worse epitaphs, and few better things you could say when they were still alive.<P> A thought to put things in context: Gary Gygax's death made the gamer news sources and the webcomics. Arthur C. Clarke's death made CBC radio. Captain America's death, now over one-year ago and still fresh in many people's minds, made later-section headlines in The National Post and the New York Times. Superman's death made the front pages. It sort of puts everything into perspective, doesn't it? <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; //-->