Back in 2001, in my third year of CEGEP, at the tail-end of my diploma in Natural Science, I was taking a biology class. Actually, I was taking two biology classes, one of which was an introductory course in anatomy and physiology (in retrospect, if I had studied harder at the time, my life now might be much, much easier, but at the time I thought I was going to be a psychologist). Like any good advanced biology course, the class had a laboratory component, which is interesting to look back on now for two reasons. First, my lab partner at the time would go on to become my brother's girlfriend three years later and still be so to this day, which is a fun fact but has nothing to do with anything else I'm thinking about tonight. The second interesting thing is that in one of our lab periods, we experimented on ourselves, conducting some simple tests to assess the five "boring" senses. What I find quite fascinating and slightly upsetting at the time was that empirical evidence clearly demonstrated was that one of my five senses (hearing) was measurably and significantly superior to a normal human's, and that the other four (sight, smell, touch, taste) were equally far below. I'd always greatly valued my sense of hearing -- I could pick my father out of a crowded room by the sound of his unique cough and no conversation went on in my parents' home that I wasn't aware of -- but that was the first time that I really had proof that my hearing -- and thus, I -- was better than other people's.

All that being said, I've observed here before that few things have made me appreciate being able to talk as much as the times when I've lost my voice, and much the same way, I'm acutely aware of how much I rely on my hearing when it isn't working properly. For the last couple of days, my left has been blocked, perhaps due to an infection, perhaps due simply to a buildup of wax (despite the fact that I'm quite literally spending six to eight hours a day now in a room filled with trained doctors who have nothing important to do at any given moment, I haven't asked any of them to take a look at it and see). As a result, things that happen on the right side of my body sound perfectly ordinary, while things on the left side of my body sound oddly distant, kind of tinny, and a little hard to echolocate. Anything happening directly in front of or behind me sounds just plain weird and disorienting, which is making listening to music tonight a surprisingly odd experience, and not in a good way.

I know enough medicine at this time to be able to identify the likely causes of my hearing difficulty. I know enough to know how to treat it with simple tools already around the home. I know enough to know that it's going to take four or five days to get better no matter what I do and I'd better get used to being like this for a while yet. A little knowledge is a wonderful, amazing, depressing thing.

The really weird thing about it is this: bone conduction. Under normal circumstances, you hear sound through two mechanisms: air conduction, which is when waves in the air stimulate your sympanic membrane, get converted into vibrations in the middle ear, and get interpreted as sounds by the inner ear, and bone conduction, which is when the skull itself vibrates and the inner ear interpretes that as sound. When you talk, you perceive both the waves in the air and of your own head, whereas other people hear only the waves in the air; this is why your voice always sounds different to you when you speak versus when it's recorded and played back to you. When air conduction fails -- the tympanic membrane is broken or your ear gets blocked -- then bone conduction becomes more prominent on that side than air conduction, and suddenly, sounds that come from inside the head sound louder than sounds from outside the head. I can hear myself swallow. I can hear my tongue moving in my mouth and my teeth clacking together. If I incline my head a few degrees to the side, I can head my own beating pulse (which, interestingly, tends to make it slow down after a second or so). Every time I take a step, I could swear I hear a voice in my ear saying "doom!" (which I can only hope is due to the blocked ear). I'm having a miserable time judging how loudly I'm speaking; people keep asking me to speak up, because I keep being worried I'm raising my voice and over-compensating. Curiously, I'm having a lot more trouble than usual distinguishing sounds; whereas normally I can follow two or three conversations at once, I'm now finding that if there's major background noise then I can't tell what people right next to me are saying (so far, nobody seems to have picked up on the fact that I can't tell what they're saying, which just goes to show what a good listener I am).

I'm axgerating a little bit, I suppose. I'm still functional, after all. I'm turning to look when I cross the street because I'm less positive that no cars are coming based on sound, but I'm still perfectly able to hear a heartbeat and breath sounds through my stethescope, and I can carry on conversations just fine as long as I don't also try to listen to the conversation next to me. I've yet to have to ask a patient to speak up, though I may lean in a tiny bit more than I normally would when they speak. I think it's actually helped with my understanding of the French-speaking patients, because it's forcing me to listen more closely to catch any words I might otherwise miss. The mark of a fool, it is said, is that they look for ways to turn their flaws into strengths, and the mark of a wise person, it is said, is that they find them; since I've been known to play both roles with equal facility, I'll just call it even and say that a blocked ear isn't the end of the world. Still, I'm feeling very, very grateful that it's only happened to one ear at a time, and doubly so that I can be confident that it'll go away soon and I can listen to my music comfortably.

Editor's note: A very close friend of mine devotes a sizable portion of her life to singing and storytelling -- by which I mean the traditional "telling of stories" rather than, as I usually mean, running D&D games. For the longest time, I've been threatening her that one day, I would sit down and write an epic poem about a penguin, which she could then be grateful not to have to perform ever. As I sit writing this introductory paragraph, that epic poem is not yet done, and in fact I don't really have any idea what it's going to be like, but as I haven't got anything else to write about tonight I'm going to put on some music, give myself a solid loading dose of sugar and see what I come up with when I stop typing. I wonder if, at moments like this, the muses love me or hate me. Anyway...

I find tofu interesting. Well, no, that's actually not wholly -- by which I mean "in any way, shape or form" -- accurate. I don't find tofu interesting, even slightly. I can see how I *might* find tofu interesting, given appropriate circumstances, but in and of itself, tofu's singularly uninteresting to me in most ways. When it's in front of me, it can be somewhat more deserving of my attention, since it's easily cut, shaped, played with, and if necessary, eaten, but in the grand scheme of things, it's probably one of the least fascinating things I can think of, ranking right up there with lipid rafts, article 13 (section 1) of the Canadian Regulations Respecting the Protection of Migratory Birds (which is, by the way, about when it is and isn't legal to ship them), and the current Olympic games, which I'm told started a few days ago.

None the less, I will now attempt to write eight hundred and fifty more words about it, in part to see if I can but mostly because it's past ten pm, I'm sleepy, closed-minded Wikipedia editors have got me in a foul mood, and I can't think of anything else to write. Though, now that I think about it, there's probably a certain degree of comedic potential in the Regulations Respecting the Protection of Migratory Birds.

So, we've established that tofu, in and of itself, isn't actually interesting, at least on a purely intellectual, non gustatory level. Many would argue that tofu remains uninteresting even on a gustatory level, but I like the stuff, personally. I've always liked bland-ish foods and simple flavours and most of the food I cook has little to nothing in the way of seasoning or extra flavouring, and if the food has a fun texture, so much the better! To me, tofu isn't so much tasty as it is fun; depending on how it's prepared, it can be anything from rubbery to squishy, which are perhaps two of my favourite textures in the whole entire universe. I appreciate it for the fact that it's nutritious and can be handily added to almost any other dish to add a touch of protein, and I like the way it takes on flavours from sauces very readily, so if I'm too cheap to add meat to a bowl of pasta, tofu makes a pretty fair alternative. I very much like the way tofu parts cleanly when cut; more than perhaps any other foodstuff in existence, carving up a big block of tofu really lets you feel what it must be like to own a lightsaber. It really should be said that these are all things I genuinely like, nay, even respect and admire about tofu, and that I'm not simply saying this because, having eaten tofu for dinner tonight, countless tofu-based protein chains are, as we speak, working themselves into my muscles and organs and will soon be in a position to usurp control and hold me hostage if I don't keep them happy.

Five hundred words to go. I don't think I can make it, but that's never stopped me before.

The one somewhat interesting thing about tofu, of course, is that it's one of the most deceptive foods there are. If you truly are what you eat, then liars should all grok lots of tofu. The seafood industry spends millions each year researching ways to make pollock taste like crab, utterly without success, and the vegetable marketers' conspiracy would like nothing more than to find some gullible person who might actually believe that a big chunk of shredded eggplant is hamburger, but the people who flavour tofu have done the one thing which other food-imitators have only dreamed of until now: they've made halfway decent products. I say "halfway" with very good reason, of course. once every six or eight months, I'll forget how much I despise tofu-based fake meat and buy some as an experiment, and inevitably, each and every time, it's a catastrophic failure which brings days of pain, suffering, and unsatisfying lunches. Still, I'm forced to admit that in recent years, the manufacturers have started to come close. When I last made this error, last week, the mock beef that I picked up could actually have been mistaken for real beef, if I'd had a bad cold and a blocked nose. It looked and felt right, which counts for a lot; if I hadn't bought it myself and read the package I might have mistook it for simply very bad-tasting meat, rather than flavoured tofu. The point, of course, isn't how far the manufacturers still have to go, as much as it is how far they've come; there are, on the market today, tofu-based products which are almost good enough to persuade someone that they're eating meat, and that's a pretty impressive lie to pull off no matter how big your marketing budget is.

One hundred and eighty left to go. That's less than one paragraph. Victory is within my grasp!

The thing that bugs me most about fake meats isn't that they fail to be what they promise, as much as the fact that I see it as a waste of tasty food. Call me crazy (or, to be strictly accurate, call me slightly unstable with significant unresolved issues from childhood and signs of schizotypal personality disorder), but I'm one of those people who actually likes the taste of tofu. Granted, I'll often add a bit of garlic or brown sugar to it when I cook it, but even on its own I find it tasty. When someone simple is good on its own, I tend to frown upon making it unecessarily complex, and so I take issue with the idea of taking good tofu and going to a great deal of trouble to transform it into bad meat. As long as they want to do it to blocks of tofu which I wasn't going to eat, I don't object too strongly, but in principle it still strikes me as wrong-headed.

Actually, I could probably keep going, but that's one thousand and eight words and it's past my bedtime, so that's that.

I've always found it very curious how Western society, which for the bulk of its existence has been intolerant at best of things that sound pagan and has traditionally gone to great lengths to apply more mainstream-friendly names to things, has continued to use names for the days of the week which directly reference the Norse gods. Most of the time, I tend to assume that it's because not enough people alive today are aware that our calendars are derived from those which centuries ago read Odin's Day, Thor's Day, and Freya's Day, but I'm not the sort to rule out the possibility of some vast Aryan conspiracy bent on handing the world over to the Aesir at some unspecified time in the future. The important thing is that today, for no apparent reason other than that they've always been called thus, our day names directly invoke the names of foreign gods; this doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I've always wondered why there aren't more religious groups out there that protest this sort of thing.

Why should the religious complain, though? In many other languages, I'm sure it helps that the days of the week are mostly derived from the names of the Roman gods, and the Roman gods are so near to being Christian as to make very little difference in the mind of the cultured person. The English speaking world doesn't have that excuse, though. Then again, what is there to be worries about? After all, it's just names, and names which have been pleasantly co-opted to be safe and English. The mere fact that Tuesday is named after the Norse god Tyr doesn't mean that people are any more likely to get their hands bitten off by bloody great wolves on that day, after all.

Fun fact: If you look at national accident records, you're most likely to get struck by lightning between Wednesday at 11:59pm and Friday at 12:01am. Really, look it up. Also, the 24 hours prior to that is when you're at the greatest statistical likelihood of falling off a cliff, landing on a tree, and poking out one of your eyes.

I, for one, have always been vaguely fascinated by the fact that, in English at least, the days of the week could actually be mistaken for having been named for numbers. That's hardly without precedent; in a lot of Semitic languages, including both Hebrew (but not Yiddish) and Arabic, days are literally names "day number one," "day number two" and so forth, which is a perfectly logical and efficient if singularly inartistic way of doing things. When I was growing up and before I began to start reading about where languages came from (call it around grade three), I took it as a given that English days of the week had the same basic logic. I'd been learning Hebrew for a few years by then, so I was quite adapted to the idea that days had names like yom rishon and yom sheini. The theory had some face validity; pronounce them with a little imagination and and the English days are Oneday, Twosday, Wednesday, Foursday, F(r)iveday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if I ever stopped to wonder why the pattern was incomplete it was only to wonder why some of the days were pronounced funny, rather than why only half of them fit. It would be only years later that it would occur to me that, given that most calendars assume that Sunday is day number one, the similarity between Monday and Oneday was probably more coincidence than anything else. The alternative would be to suggest that something in life actually makes more sense from my point of view than it does from the point of view of an ordinary, right-thinking person, and that's a possibility which is just too fnord horrid to contemplate.

Thought for the day: Our culture's work-week is structured to emulate the story of Genesis, wherein it is said that god worked for six days and then rested. If you think about it, in the story of Genesis it says quite clearly that god finished creating the world in six days and then stopped, so by all rights, we should all work from Sunday to Friday and then never work again.

If I was naming the days of the week for a new calendar, I'm not sure which route I'd use to name them. I certainly wouldn't use the traditional Monday-Sunday system; it's pretty enough and conveniently familiar, but it's so cliche, and aside from how amusing I find it that we unknowingly venerate Odin and Thor to this day, the Norse pantheon doesn't do it for me. Similarly, I probably wouldn't go by the numerical naming system, because it's not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing (though it must be said that in my revised calendar, day one would be Monday and not Sunday). Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a dozen different naming systems, ranging from naming the days of the week after fictional characters (though g'karday just doesn't sound right) or moods commonly associated with them (it might be a bad idea to instutitionalize starting the week with depressionday, of course) but none of these meet with my satisfaction somehow. It seems quite possible to me that the big reason that nobody has ever attempted to rename the paganish day names is that it's difficult to think of better ones that would be widely acceptable and still sound halfway decent; at a certain point you have to say that yes, we'll keep brainstorming it because we might get a cool idea any minute now, but for the time being let's just leave it how it is and save money on new calendars. The moral is, Odin gets a day named after him but it's Laziness that really rules the world.

And that's all I've got to say on the topic on this, Threeday the sixth of August. Or should that be Eighthmonth?

Tennyson wrote that words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within. I find that a pretty profound statement, personally; I've always felt that communication is one of the most important skills for someone to have and I have little patience for people who refuse to take the time to explain their thoughts when needed. On the other hand, I'm an unrepenetant sophist, and one of the great joys of my life is twisting language into new, interesting, and incomprehensible permutations. I think that Tennyson's thought is pretty true of my writing; if I'm doing my job right, then everything I write should at once appear to have deep, profound meaning and yet at the same time make it difficult of impossible to tell if anything I've said is at all true, and the same can also be said to be true for most of the things I say to people in person. All that being said, there's still something to be said for actual clear communication, which can be just as artistic and beautiful as a masterfully spun lie, and it can be just as difficult to find someone able to appreciate that art.

Consider: At the hospital where I'm working this month, my duties are to see three or four patients each morning, speak to them, identify the purpose of their visit, conduct a basic physical examination, record their vital signs, determine if they're sick, report my findings to an actual doctor, and finally take either the doctor to see the patient or (more often) the doctor's message to the patient. At the end, it's my responsibility to wrire a comprehensible, complete, and (most challengingly) legible note in the patient's chart, so that the next person to see them (who could easily be another equally hapless and untrained student) has some information with which to work. There are in this process four, perhaps five distinct stages at which poor communication could result in utter catastrophe for the patient, or worse, a poor evaluation for me. In my first week, more than fifty percent of the patients I saw spoke French either as their first language or as their preferred language; several spoke no English at all. Aside from the fact that my stutter remains far worse in French than in English (particularly annoyingly, I can almost never get through the phrase "preferez-vous Francais?" on the first try), I've been handling these communications pretty well, or at least, well enough that only one patient felt the need to switch to English for my benefit and several have reassured me that I speak far better French than I seem to think. Still, miscommunications come up. In English, or rather, in English medicine, a ganglion is a bundle of nerves which acts as a sort of mini-brain at various locations in the body, or else a type of harmless fluid-filled cyst which can accumulate at any joint. In french, however, a ganglion is a lymph node, a collection of immune tissue which can become enlarged and visible in many conditions, including mononucleosis, cancer, and mosquito bites. Relatively few non science-trained anglophones have anything other than a vague idea of what a lymph node is and will rarely if ever point one out or say that they think they know what one is, but curiously, the ability to recognise un ganglion gonflé is pretty common among French-speakers. When a mother asked me to check the small lump on her daughter's head which she thought was un ganglion, and I reported to my supervisor that she thought her daughter had a cyst, it was clearly not the first time he'd seen an anglophone make this mistake, as he told me what the child actually had before I'd even finished my sentence, let alone examined the girl for himself. So, there's the importance of communication for you.

On an unrelated note, it really was quite interesting to have my first experience with an iatrophobic three year-old. I would never have managed to get within a foot of her if her mother hadn't physically held her in place, and listening to her heart or lungs was certainly out of the question. It's a lot of fun to be feared, but it's annoying when it gets in the way of my job. At least when I can cause that kind of blind unreasoning shrieking terror in adults, it'll be profitable, and in the meantime thank penguinness I'm not the one who has to give this kid her vaccines.

Finally, on the topic of clear communication, I'm finding it very difficult to properly convey the idea to patients that I'm a medical student. According to McGill's codes and my own convoluted code of honour, it would be highly inappropriate for me to introduce myself to a patient as a doctor, and so I'm quite scurpulous in always introducing myself as "Eric, a third-year medical student working with (inert doctor's name here)." None-the-less, I've seen one patient who, every time I asked him to do something, replied "you're the doctor" and a couple of others who wish me luck with the rest of my residency. I'm also reliably informed that when patients show up at reception, they're told that their appointment is with "Doctor Lis" (which gives me a funny, tingly, horrible feeling each time I hear it). I can understand that for reasons of logistics and patient peace of mind it's easier to tell patients that they're seeing a doctor rather than a medical student, and it may also be that the people at the reception desk don't know the difference between a medical student (i.e., not a doctor) and a resident (i.e., a doctor, albeit an as-yet perhaps borderline incompetent one). And, of course, if it is a deliberate lie being told to patients, then I of all people haven't got the moral high-ground to criticize that or any interest in doing so. Still, I find that I walk the fine line between ensuring that my patients have the ethically-obligated knowledge that they aren't seeing a trained doctor while also retaining their sense of safety; I can introduce myself as a medical student, but I think it might damage the doctor-patient bond of trust if I ended every sentence with "but then again, I'm not a doctor." It's a bit of a tricky position, in terms of communication, and a rather ironic one for a deceiver of my stature.

So, given that I'd estimate that I've now revealed about forty seven percent of my soul and concealed some fifty three percent, Alfred can rest easy and I can go watch Ron Perlman in Mutant Chronicles. I bet he communicates like a pro.

It's Thursday. An old and dear friend I first got to know back in high school always said that he never could get the hang of Thursdays.

More importantly, at the time that I started writing this, it's not merely Thursday, but is, in fact, 8:46pm on Thursday according to the atomic clock, or 8:50 according to my watch, which I always keep three to four minutes fast. It's dark out (though not yet full dark, since we're still on summer sunlight schedules) and has been dark(ish) for about an hour now. Sunset, if you asked the Canadian government, was at 8:24, which is only slightly more than half an hour ago and a noticable time after when it started to get dark enough outside that I needed to turn on lights to read comfortably (though I have serious questions as to whether any bureacracy, which by nature is incapable of meeting precisely schedules, is qualified to determine the precise minute of a sunset). To those who get off work at 5 or 6pm, the evening probably begins the moment they get out of the office; since I got home today around 3:30, I consider my evening to have started around 6:40, which is when I had dinner. Since a significant number of the people in my age group and socioeconomic status (not "peers, never "peers") are still on summer vacation and/or may not work on Fridays, many of them will be up late drinking and socializing, long after I, who has to be bright-eyed and poofy-haired in the hospital at 8:30 tommorow morning, have gone to bed. Which all leads us to a curious observation:

"There is no such thing as night time."

Webster defines "night" variously as the time from dusk to dawn when no sunlight is visible, the quality or state of being dark, a period of dreary inactivity or affliction, and the absence of moral values, among other things. The first one there seems reasonably precise -- if it's dark out and there's no sunlight, then it's night time, barring solar eclipses and giant sun-blocking shields or what have you. unusually for Webster, the other definitions to little to obfuscate the main idea, and a significant degree of clarity is retained no matter how far you read. People like me to enjoy nit-pickinng the definitions of words have to really stretch to play with such words, looking to derived words such as "nightfall," which Webster much more helpfully defines as "the close of the day" and thus leaves open for all sorts of sophistic misinterpretation. No matter you cut it up, though, it's really quite inescapable: the word night actually has a very clear, simple, and useful definition which defies our attempts at twisting it around. Night is the period of the day after sunset and before sunrise when there isn't any direct sunlight in the sky (I say "direct" because someone, somewhere, is otherwise going to argue that moonlight is just reflected sunlight, and then we'd have to find him and beat him up, and I'm much too lazy to go to all that work). The profound observation made above, that there is no such thing as night, is obviously and patently false, no matter how impressive it might look, sitting there alone and proud as its own little paragraph. Even now that we all know it's a false and unsupportable statement, it still looks kind of compelling, all because it's got its own private line and it's got quote marks around it, which just goes to show how far you can get just by making yourself look fancy.

There aren't enough modern jazz reinterpretations of famous pieces of classical music which include the rubber duckie in their orchestra. This doesn't have anything at all to do with anything else, but it's still true.

What I actually mean when I say that there's no such thing as night, of course, is the curious phenomenon by which a night, subjectively, can seem to begin or end at very different times. In my case, I'm not the sort of person who tends to stay up very late; for the most part, this is because I usually have classes, work, or other responsibilities early in any given next morning, and so I'll typically be in bed (if not asleep) at a reasonable hour, but even when I have nothing important to do the next morning, I'll usually be in bed by midnight or one in the morning, because that's when I get tired. Given reason to stay up -- a movie, an addictive novel, tea with friends, a party -- I can certainly choose to stay awake up to three in the morning and I can make myself to remain pretty functional to five or later as long as I can keep myself intellectually stimulated. I tend to assume -- for all I know, quite wrongly -- that this is the normal state for most people, despite the fact that many of the people around me do some of their best living between midnight and two am, no matter how early they need to be up the next day. In the case of those summer-vacationers I mentioned back in paragraph two, it's probably entirely normal for them to stay up until three or four in the morning and then sleep until noon the next day, in part because they have nothing important to do the next morning, in part because their sleep cycles are disregulated by alcohol, and in part because that's the schedule they choose to follow and their bodies follow suit. My "night" ends a lot earlier, both because I go to sleep sooner ("calling it a night") and because I wake up sooner (thus seeing that sunlight is visible, if only subjectively). A word with an otherwise very clear and simple definition, night none-the-less means something very different to each of us... and we're both wrong, because language exists independently of how it's used and thank all the gods for that.

Webster's dictionary defines "rifleman" as "a soldier armed with a rifle," where rifle is meant to imply a non-automatic shoulder weapon with a rifled bore and specifically the sort of single-shot long-barreled firearm which was the common battlefield weapon of the eighteenth century. The word itself is thought to have been first derived in the late 1700's; words like "swordsman" had long since been common, so it wasn't a huge cultural or linguistic leap to coin the term rifleman, but the fact that's it's pegged to be around then suggests the importance of the rifle at the time. The Gamers' Dictionary goes on to add that the rifleman is a very significant unit in a game of Civilization, as it marks the sudden and tactically important jump from pre to post-gunpowder units, and in such a game the first player to invent the rifleman develops a huge tactical advantage. If the rifleman can be made somehow even more effective -- say, by giving them ninja skills or the power to fly or something -- then just imagine the (moderately) unstoppable force that could be unleashed. case in point, a curious thing happened this past week as I was playing my regular game of Civ IV: a bunch of my riflemen turned invisible.

Now, in most games, it might not be odd for my troops to turn invisible. To be sure, I've played plenty of games where my characters or units turned invisible; sometimes this was because I was cheating, and sometimes it wasn't. The important thing is, in most games, if my character suddenly develops the power to turn invisible, it's usually because the game was programmed, one way or another, to allow this to happen. Not so with Civilization IV; none of its standard or built in cheat functions allow you to turn a group of riflemen invisible for any length of time, particularly since I was playing a hotseat game with a friend and none of the normal cheat codes work in multiplayer. I could, as I've suggested in a previous post, have gone into the game's program files and easily turned any unit I wanted invisible, but I hadn't done so, as evidenced by the fact that very few of my riflemen had changed this way (only three or four squads of riflemen disappeared from view over the course of the game). None the less, in the middle of a perfectly fair and disgustingly cheat-free game of Civilization, midway through conquering Egypt, a whole bunch of my riflemen turned, suddenly and quite inexplicably, completely invisible. I know that they were doing it on purpose because they turned invisible only while in battle; on the map, during the unit movement phase, they remained perfectly visible as normal. I knew that Civilization tends to throw surprises at the player, but this was one I really hadn't seen coming.

The invisible battles were really something quite extraordinary to see. Had it been merely a glitch in graphics, then the game should have continued perfectly normal except for the fact that you couldn't see my troops, but this wasn't the case. In point of fact, the very progress of the combat changed. If it had been an error of graphics, then Egyptian archers' arrows should have flown straight and true and simply disapeared when they hit my soldiers. Instead, the Egyptians milled around looking confused -- which I truly didn't know could happen in the game -- fired a few desultory arrows in the general direction of my troops which all quite clearly hit the ground and accomplished nothing, and then keeled over stone dead in a hail of invisible but quite audible gunfire. I can tell that this had a terribly demoralizing effect on the enemy armies, because the next time that my soldiers attacked a city, the enemy archers actually fled, cute little game sprites running out the back of their city and (and I couldn't make this up if I tried) fleeing on foot across the ocean (which again, I had no idea could happen in the game). In the end, though, my own soldiers clearly became complacent, lazy, and stupid as a result of the ease of their victories; a few combats later, a fight scene lasted some thirty seconds, wherein nobody fired any shots and then the computer informed me that I had lost the fight; I can only assume that, unable to see themselves, my invisible riflemen had gotten turned around, been unable to find the enemy, wandered into the sea and invisibly drowned. The really astounding thing is that after all that, my riflemen stopped being invisible; perhaps the other riflemen realized the the risk they too were at of wandering into the ocean or off ot cliffs or what have you and decided it would be worthwhile to be able to see their own feet in the future, and deactivated their cloaking devices. In-combat casualties, of course, skyrocketed.

Possible explanations: 1) I'm unconciously a technopath. Unlikely because automatic tellers rarely spontaneously add money to my bank account and my computer frequently disobeys my commands. 2) The Goddess was having me on. Never impossible, but this was a little overt by Her standards, even given my imagination. 3) Forsteri was having me on. Slightly more probable, but then my riflemen would probably have spontaneously dressed up in red, white and yellow powered armour instead, and besides, Forsteri's miracles have traditionally been the sort that happen through my own work. 4) I hallucinated/dreamed/imagined the whole thing. Would be entirely likely, except that it was a two-player game and I had a witness sitting right next to me, watching the whole thing. 5) I'm making this all up. Normally the most likely scenario, because let's face it, lying to you people is one of my four greatest joys in life, but in this case, nope. 6) In the words of the great G'kar of Narn, this was just one of those great universal mysteries which will either never be explained, or would drive you mad if you ever learn the truth. Conveniently, this gives me precisely six explanations, so I can believe them all tommorow before breakfast and make the Queen of Hearts very proud of me.

A little known fact about me is that I'm actually a shareholder in Yahoo Inc. I say "little known" because, for the most part, I'm unaware of it.

Long long ago, when I was fresh to the world of the internet and before my high school had computers for the students to use, I built my first website on Geocities. At the time, I had two things which I lack today (spare time and interest in the well-being of other people) and so I joined the Community Leaders, a program of volunteers who dedicate their time to monitoring chat rooms for impropriety, visiting random Geocities member pages and checking them for improper content, and being generally available to other users to answer questions and give advice. Back then, my minimal skills in HTML were worlds ahead of what the average person online was capable of, and so I was actually qualified to give pretty good programming help, but I actually failed the test to become a chat room monitor because the test required you to write a list of words which Geocities considered to be unacceptable public language and I, of course, was and remain psychologically incapable of writing common swear words. Anyway, the CL program was on a volunteer basis, but we did occasional rewards from Geocities, including, when the company went public in the late twentieth century, free stock options.

I never received my Geocities stock, for reasons no one has ever been sure about. When the company went public, I, like every community leader, was offered ten shares, which I happily accepted. The certificates were never mailed to me, however, probably because at the time, Geocities believed that my address was in the Palace district of the Aerican Empire (which is rather curious, since when I signed up with them I'd given them my real home address and I have no clue how it changed). Etrade, the trading company in charge of the whole thing, was singularly unhelpful to a degree that would make any bureaucrat jealous. Anyway, the stocks were worth about twenty dollars at the time, so I didn't consider it a big issue and promptly forgot the whole thing, although I do change my address to my real one to avoid any such unpleasantness in the future. Fast forward a couple of years; Geocities is the largest provider of free webspace in the world and, consequently, gets bought out by the search engine, Yahoo. Geocities stock is converted to Yahoo stock at a rate of three Geocities shares becoming one Yahoo share, which is still a net profit for me. Over the subsequent months, Yahoo's stock splits. And splits. I don't recall when exactly it happened, but at some point in the early 2000's I looked up stock prices on a whim and discovered that my shares in Yahoo were worth well over a thousand dollars, which brought on one of the two or three genuine spit-takes I've had in my life. It was also at this point that I learned I didn't actually have any access to the shares; they were in my name, and I got the stockholder news bulletins in the mail every once in a while, but the certificates had been lost years ago, nobody knew where they were, and nobody knew which financial institution was responsible for replacing them for non-US owners. I got a good laugh out of the whole thing and, once again, forgot it for a few years.

In the last year or two, I've actually made some inquiries as to the status of these stocks. Yahoo stock these days is managed by a holding company whose name escapes me (I've got it written down somewhere) and they do have me on file as being the proper stock owner. Because the certificates were lost, however, and the customer is always accountable for lost certificates even if they were never mailed to him in the first place, the cost of replacing the certificates and sending them to me (which, of course, I never received) was deducted from the stocks' value. Today, I don't know how much stock I own. I don't know what it's worth today, but probably something in the area of sixty dollars, and I generally assume that they were stolen from me by one or more crooked holding companies years ago. There might be a moral there, but I can't be bothered to care very much... easy come, easy go, as they say, but more importantly, the Goddess has gotten a huge laugh out of the whole thing and it wouldn't surprise me if she was somehow responsible for changing my address all those years ago.

None the less, I know I'm still a stockholder because I still get mail from Yahoo asking me to vote on issues before the board of directors. Particularly recently, with some very unpleasant politicking and back-stabbing going on in the Yahoo boardrooms, I've gotten quite a lot of mail from them, impassioned pleas for me to vote to re-elect the current board of directors and save the company from being stolen by an evil investor who wants to sell parts of the company to Microsoft. I'm actually in favour of things going quite badly for Yahoo because if they're bought out then there's every chance that my Yahoo stock will convert to Microsoft stock, which will serve me well in a few more years when the Megacorps start agglomerating and conquering the world. Once that happens, and national boundaries are erased in favour of corporate borders and all police and security forces are privatized, the only people with political standing or the right to be protected will be those with money or those with stock in the megacorps themselves, and I'll be one of those rare, priviledged, protected few. Not that anyone will know sure if I'm actually a shareholder or not, of course, least of all me, but at least i'll have a head-start on things.

I'd thought that was a good ending to this post, but it came out to only 999 words on the nose and it's a shame to miss one thousand by one word, so: fnord.

A curious thing happened to me today, which I'm ashamed happens to me more often than I'd like. Today, I needed to go visit my dentist to have the stitches from my recent surgery removed, an errand made slightly more complex in so far as I had to find a time when A) I wasn't in class and B) my dentist was working. Today and today only I finished classes early enough -- in theory -- that I could conveniently make it to his office. I planned everything, as is my habit, and everything would have gone perfectly if irresponsible and annoying presenters in front of my class hadn't run half an hour longer than they were supposed to and had I not then been further delayed because I had to stay after class to pick up a pager (tragically mandatory equipment in later years of my program). Because the lectures ran late, I had no hope of making the bus I'd planned to take to my dentist, but, as is my nature, I had a backup plan, another bus I could take which, though it would require me to take a 20 minute walk, would still get me to the dentist on time. I hadn't properly calculated how long pager distribution would take for a class of 180 people, and it was 100% certain that had I waited for my proper turn in the lineup I would have missed the last bus I could possibly have taken to get to my appointment on time. There was clearly an unofficial option for people with just cause to jump ahead in the line, and I had a good reason, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to do so. Yes, I had a good reason, but there were another hundred and seventy people who were waiting contentedly in line, and I had this overwhelming feeling that my standing up and getting my pager early would be... unjust. I, Eric Lis, trickster and chaos-worshipper, was stuck in the rules, half from stupid pride and half from some indefinable sense of Wrongness. I'm fortunate beyond words that I wasn't in that auditorium alone, and that my ever astonishingly wonderful girlfriend usually has a lot more sense than me. Not bothering to ask my permission, she got up from her seat, picked up my forms, and had the students in charge of distribution wave me forward in line. I got my pager (for better or worse) and, by a combination of luck with the busses and my own absurdly fast walking speed, I made it to the dentist with a good ten minutes to spare. My dentist, to his credit, saw me precisely on time. The moral of this story is that one of my greatest flaws is that from time to time, for no reason at all, I'll fixate on an idea -- often a self-destructive one -- and in the face of all reason, logic, common sense, and enlightened self-interest, I'll find myself unable to deviate from a course of action. It was moments like this that taught me that I'm not truly a creature of chaos as much as I am a creature of balance; I bring chaos with most of my life, but there's a lot of order in my soul too, and if I'm not careful it comes out at very inconvenient times. From time to time I need a gentle push to help me remember that sometimes, you really do have to break the rules. And then, sometimes I need to be reminded with a good solid smack to the head, because I'm stubborn enough that a gentle push often won't do it. I am indescribably fortunate to have people around me who don't hesitate to force me to do stuff when I need to. I'm doubly fortunate that most of them read this Journal where I get to thank them if I haven't done it properly in person.

Speaking of times when cheating's justified, let's talk about my continuing addiction to Civilization IV, now well into its seventh month.

The single-player mode of Civ IV has an impressive range of easily-accessed cheat codes and debug functions, making it very much my kind of game. The multiplayer hotseat mode, however, which is what I spend most of my time playing, does not have any cheat codes, which makes the game significantly less easy as well as less wacky. When a good and dear friend and I created our most recent Civ game a couple of weeks back, I appear to have accidentally set the level of difficuty to "Noble" instead of "Settler" which is akin to setting the difficult to "slightly harder than average" when you meant to set it to "easiest possible setting in the game." Make no mistake, we're still winning the game by a wide margin -- we two players are on a single team whereas all six computer players are each on their own, which means we're doing all science at double speed and we both benefit from any wonders that the other one builds. That said, at the higher level of difficulty, it's taking us longer to win; we expend an average of four to eight soldeirs for each city we capture and one of the computer players actually managed to build a wonder before we did. If I was playing in single player, then I'd simply automatically complete all research and start literally dropping tanks onto my enemies' doorsteps, but since you can't do that in multiplayer mode, we're doing it the hard way, fighting for every square of ground and buying every city with the spilled pixels of Our Boys.

That's how the game is going, anyway, because when we realised that we were playing on the harder level of difficulty by mistake, we decided to relish the extra challenge and see how well we did when the computer actually had a fighting chance. If the tide of battle started to really turn against us, we could cheat. The basic codes may not be working, but occasional strange occurences not-withstanding, I'm a very practiced cheater, and I can find a way to cheat at almost anything if you give me some time. In this case, when Civ IV came out, it was designed to be a game in which an educated player could change almost every aspect of the game. To this end, all of the games basic files were written in XML format, something not too unlike Java (at least to my inexperienced eye). An experienced programmer who got their hands on the game could rewrite every single play value to customize the game to their heart's content; I'm not a talented programmer, but I've got a knack for getting into code and figuring out what does what, and given ten minutes to play around with Microsoft Notepad I was able to design a unit of men, buildable only by the player who first built the Pyramids wonder, which can fly across the world at supersonic speeds and bench-press tanks. Sadly, I'm nowhere near talented enough to figure out how to create entirely new units, or else the most deadly unit in the game would suddenly be the Killer Penguin Death Squad; as it is, I simply have to settle for screwing with the stats of already existing units, which is less cool but still more than enough to conquer the entire world in the space of a few turns if I was so inclined. Up to now, because we're still winning, albeit slowly and at a horrific loss of life, I haven't actually implemented any of my modified units into the game, but it's always good to have the backup plan of unstoppable nuclear battle-droids if the going gets tough.

Cheating: Because sometimes the best way to go through life really is to take the quick and easy path.

Genetically, I've got good teeth. In a body where more things are sub-par or non-functional than not, this is actually kind of noteworthy; there are four, maybe five systems in my body which operate equal to or better than human average, and one of them, oddly enough, is my teeth. I've had good teeth as far back as I can remember -- I've gone to see the dentist every year and saw an orthodontist throughout high school, which helped, but most of the time they didn't find themselves doing anything very interesting to me. For a period of only a couple of years I wore partial braces, I wore a retainer to sleep for a while, and two of my wisdom teeth were removed "just in case"; other than that, my teeth have always tended to be straight, properly-sized, non-impacted, cavity-free, and pleasingly sharp and rending. That's speaking only about my teeth, however; my gums have always been a different story. For most of my life, my gums have been is relatively poor shape. My family has a natural predisposition to gingivitis no matter how much we brush and floss. On top of that, when I was in high school, my dentist observed that an area of my gums around my bottom teeth (right in front of 3-1 for those who are really curious) was a bit thinner than it ought to be and advised me to get a graft from the mucosa of my palate, which I received. The graft has held up well over the years and I've had no further problems until this past summer, when my dentist noticed that another area of my gums had become thinner than he'd like, which predisposes to severe and painful infection in addition to tooth loss. He suggested that I get another graft, just like the first one, and I agreed; the nice thing about having your cousin for your dentist is that you can be reasonably confident that he isn't suggesting unecessary surgery just to get your money. So, despite the fact that at this moment I'm feeling just fine, I'm technically four or so days post-op and still healing, and there's a little hole in the top of my mouth that I can feel every so often.

Being in medicine has somewhat changed my perspective on surgery. For example, the first time I had a gingival graft done, I kept my eyes tightly closed the entire time, not so much out of fear as out of a fear of finding I was afraid. This time, I found myself watching the procedure with moderate interest; I knew what drugs the dentist was injecting me with to anesthetize the area and I was pleased to note that he tied his sutures the same way I was taught to, looping the thread around the needle-driver twice and then pulling to the sides to tighten. When he told me to avoid brushing that area of gums for about three days, I nodded sagely, since that's how long it takes for the granulation tissue to start to stabilize and for the new blood vessels to toughen up to resist shear stress. Not only was I in the position to appreciate the improvements being made to my body, I was in a position to appreciate the dentist's handiwork and surgical skills. It's always nice to know that the person working on you is good at his or her job.

I've been pleased to find that I'm in even less discomfort than I thought I might be. Minor surgery is still surgery, and even small cuts and scrapes are able to be an annoying discomfort several days later. The procedure was minor enough not to require heavy-duty pain killers or antibiotics, and in the ninety-six hours after the surgery, I think I needed to use an over-the-counter pain-killer all of three or four times (once when I got home and the anesthetic was just wearing off, which was more itchy than painful and the rest before meals when I was actively going to be opening and closing my jaws). Most importantly, I wasn't in any pain when I laughed, which was fortunate since forty-eight hours after the surgery I was in the audience at the comedy fest and laughing uproariously.

It's only a shame that fixing living bodies isn't as easy as fixing, say, a temperamental refrigerator. I woke up this morning and observed that the inside of my fridge seemed oddly close to room temperature; a quick glance at the freezer revealed the contents of that appliance to be mostly thawed and melted. I confess that a few minutes were passed trying to figure out what to do about the situation, and that at no point was there any decisive leaping-into-action on my part. Fortunately, the fridge in my apartment is the responsibility of the building and not the tenant, so a quick call down the to the desk arranged for a repairman to come by that same day. The building's rental agent was aay on vacation, of course... appliances always wait until the person in charge of the building is away before they commit any act of sabotage... but the fellow watching the desk made all the arrangements anyway, with excellent speed. When the repairman arrived some hours later, the cause of the problem was found to be the plastic grille which sits in the back of the freezer separating the food from the fan; he grille had broken off and fallen back to keep the an from spinning, which apparently paralyzes the entire temparure regulation system. Had I looked into the back of the freezer myself five hours earlier, I could no doubt have spotted the problem and fixed it myself by the simple expedient of lifting up the grille, and if I was feeling really keen, and I might have even picked up my beloved cyanoacrylate-based superglue and repaired it, saving myself some stress, my building some money and my food an unnecessary defrosting, but I hadn't even looked. There's an important moral here, and if I'm in unusually good form I might even learn it.

In any case... as things stand today, my fridge is fixed and I'm fixed (or at least, my self-repair systems are working busily and I'm well on the way to restoring 100% niftiness. The real lesson is: when you worship gods who hold dominion over probability, everything in life still goes wrong but at least circumstances tend to align in such a way that you can deal with most crises when you've got a week off rather than when full-time classes or work resume a couple of days later.