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 531-540<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/501-600/541-550.html">Entries 541-550</a><BR> <a href="#540">Entry 540</a> November 13 2008<br> <a href="#539">Entry 539</a> November 10 2008<br> <a href="#538">Entry 538</a> November 7 2008<br> <a href="#537">Entry 537</a> November 4 2008<br> <a href="#536">Entry 536</a> November 1 2008<br> <a href="#535">Entry 535</a> October 29 2008<br> <a href="#534">Entry 534</a> October 26 2008<br> <a href="#533">Entry 533</a> October 23 2008<br> <a href="#532">Entry 532</a> October 20 2008<br> <a href="#531">Entry 531</a> October 17 2008<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/501-600/521-530.html">Entries 521-530</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="540"></a> <U><B>Life At My House</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "You know what this game needs? House rules." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> One of my long-standing favourite boardgames of all time has to be The Game of Life, one of the first boardgames of the modern era and a much-loved game even among most experienced and jaded gamers. First developed in 1860 by Milton Bradley himself, the game has gone through a number of innovations, some larger than others, but at its core we see the same basis of the game: get a good job, get rich before anybody else, rule the world. It's a simple game -- one might even say "simplistic" -- and ruled as it is by the spinner, the game is almost totally based on luck (this can be either a disadvantage, because skill and cleverness mean nothing, or a major advantage, such as if you aren't as good at other, more intelligent games as your friends are). Life has existed in three basic iterations, but the most well-known -- and the only one I've ever had occasion to play -- was the edition which dominated store shelves between 1960 and 1992. Politically incorrect and almost comically naive, the game is none-the-less an ancient classic which sits in the collections of a great many people I know. The trouble is, no game is perfect, and Life is slightly less perfect than many I could name. Many of the spaces are unimaginative, the goals are too simple, and the outcomes are outmoded in this day and age. The solution, of course, is to change the game, which is where we come to those two little words that strike both joy and terror into the hearts of all gamers: "House Rules."<P> One great weakness of Life is that the majority of spaces do nothing more exciting than add or subtract money to your pile. There's nothing wrong with this -- it's exactly what the game is supposed to be like -- but it can make the game a little repetitive. In any game, reading the flavour text of the space you land on should be as fun as seeing what the space does to you; in Life, it's easy to get so bored with the flavour text that you just skip it and count out the change in your money. By adding in some more interesting spaces, the game can be made much more exciting. It'd be a lot of work to sit down and work out the ideal placement of new spaces on the board, calculating which of the existing spaces are most redundant, so instead I'll just say that every tenth space can safely be replaced with one of these below, unless they're one of the spaces that let you buy stock or something. If every tenth space is unusual, you could easily go the entire game without ever hitting one of the odd spaces... a prospect some people will find very reassuring.<p> <ul> <LI>Zombie Outbreak: When you land on this space, a zombie outbreak begins at the hospital (the square near the beginning which makes "doctor" your career); place a zombie token on this square. The zombies move four squares at a time, but take a move at the end of every player's turn. Players must now move quickly, not just to reach the end first and become a millionaire, but also to stay ahead of the tide of the undead. If the zombies overtake any player, that player loses a spouse, child, or other passenger from their car and immediately moves ahead five spaces times the number of players. If the event that a player is the only person in their car when they are overtaken by zombies, they are messily devoured; they lose the game, though their car still jumps forward the same number of spaces and sits in that square for the rest of the game, a grim reminder of the horror chasing them. <LI>Giant Monster Attack: When a player lands on this square, a giant fire-breathing reptile (or other monster of the players' choice) emerges from the nearest body of water (if two bodies of water are equidistant, pick the one closest to the beginning of the board). At the end of that player's turn for the rest of the game, the monster walks along the board, destroying everything in its path. The monster moves with the spinner but never moves faster than 8 spaces. If it lands directly on a player, that player is out of the game. If it passes over a player without stopping on their square, there is no ill effect. Any space which the monster lands on becomes a blank square and has no effect on players who land on it for the rest of the game. Any space whose flavour text specifically involves buildings (build a homeless shelter, donate to the hospital, buy a house, etc) is destroyed simply by the monster passing over it even if it does not land on that space. If a player is stomped by the monster, they earn one million dollars if they had life insurance. <LI>Land Mine: You explode. If you have life insurance, you gain five hundred thousand dollars, which means you might win anyway. <LI>Buy a Helicopter: This is actually one of the squares in the normal game; you lose a huge sum of money and never get to see your so-called helicopter. When you land on this space you may select one of two options. If you use your helicopter sensibly, you may choose to add 2 to any movement spins you make for the rest of the game; you decide after each spin whether you want to move the number spun or add 2. If you use the helicopter less sensibly, you may immediately move ahead an additional ten spaces or fly above the roads in any direction for 3 inches; if this lets you reach a legal square on another track of the board entirely, thus bypassing fifty squares, so much the better. If you use the helicopter less sensibly, you crash it; you cannot use the helicopter again, even if for some reason you should land on the space a second time, and furthermore lose ten thousand dollars, above and beyond the helixopter's own cost, paying hospital bills. <LI>Rob a Bank: Everybody has bad luck sometimes, and some people see opportunity where others see felony. When you land on this space, spin the spinner. On a 9-10, you sucessfully rob a bank and obtain one hundred thousand dollars. On a 4-8, you sucessfully rob a bank and escape with fifty thousand dollars. On a 1-3, the heist goes wrong and ends in a horrible shootout; you escape with ten thousand dollars and discard your spouse or one child. If you are alone in your car, you die in a hail of bullets and lose the game. <LI>Cookies!: When you land on this square, you earn one hundred thousand dollars, as a measurement for the joy of eating cookies. Each time a new player lands on this space, anyone who has landed on it previously also gains one hundred thousand dollars, because it would be rude not to share your cookies. </ul> This fixes the problem of the board not being exciting enough, but the goals still leave something to be desired. Thus, one way to play is to give every player their own goal... not everyone is in life just to make money, of course. At the end of the game, a player who has achieved their personal goal is considered to have five hundred thousand dollars more than their actual money, to reflect their greater life satisfaction and sense of fulfillment. Some sample special goals include:<P> <UL> <LI>Nature-Lover: Land on at least five spaces which involve protecting the environment, saving animals, planting trees or so forth. <LI>Inventor: Land on at least three spaces where you invent something or win the nobel prize. <LI>Small-Timer: Go the entire game without ever getting more than fifty thousand dollars from a single square. <LI>What's Yours Is Mine: Sucessfully steal money from players at least four times using Share the Wealth cards. <LI>Demolition Derby: You may ram into other players' cars by landing on the same space as them; each time you do, they must pay five thousand dollars in damages and you must pay one thousand. You may choose to move one square less than the number you spun if will let you ram another car. You fulfill your goal if you lose five thousand dollars in this manner. <LI>Fagin: Collect enough passengers to fill up your car. You may move one space less or more than you spun if it allows you to pick up a son or daughter. </ul> For added fun, try playing where all the goals are secret; everyone writes their goal down and hides it until the end of the game, and players try to guess each others' goals by their actions.<P> The game can be made a bit more interesting by changing around the outcomes. Who says you're forced to get married? Maybe you're still dating; spin a number when you land on the wedding space, and you become married only the next time that you spin that number again. Is wealth too shallow a goal? Set a precise monetary value needed to, say, build an orbiting death-ray, and if you reach millionaire before you earn that much money, start moving back towards the start of the board, hitting spaces again as you go.<P> Finally, we come to one last way to play: Chaos Life. Chaos Life should be played only if you have a lot of free time, some friends you *really* like and don't easily get angry at (a minimum of three players is needed), and probably some alcohol. In Chaos Life, every square has an effect thematically related to it, and the effects of each square are made up on the spot by group consensus, and voting in the case of disagreement. This method of play can get out of hand very easily and should be played with a great deal of caution. <HR> <a name="539"></a> <U><B>Praytime</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "Hmm... Most of these are just asking me to forgive you or give you presents, aren't they?" <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> It's believed among Jewish scholars that, around the eighth century, there lived a rabbi named Elazar ha-Kallir (literally, "Elazar the Cookie"), a famous poet and philosopher whose works remain in Jewish prayer books today and yet has no entry in Wikipedia. He has nothing to do with anything else I'm going to speak of today except for the fact that his name is mentioned in the same paragraph as something I was reading the other day, which is a discourse on the importance of prayer and, more importantly, what makes for a meaningful or unmeaningful prayer, written by an author in the twelfth century. The text states, "If you cannot concentrate when you pray, search for melodies and choose a tune you like. Your heart will then feel what you say, for it is the song that makes your heart respond." To be strictly honest, of course, the author didn't say this; English didn't exist per se in the twelfth century and he was probably writing in Hebrew. It must also be pointed out that the author is now dead, and thus whatever he said has to be considered suspect. None-the-less, I find this a remarkable sentiment; when I think of the medieval period, I don't tend to think of religious freedom and open-mindedness, even amongst my own people. I've always felt strongly that prayer is meant to be a very personal, subjective thing, which is one of the major reasons I rebelled so strongly against the Jewish education I had as a child which focused so strongly on memorizing and reciting the "right" prayers and not on learning the meaning behind them. What this author -- probably a rabbi -- is saying is, in essence, "the right prayer for you is the one that moves you, not the one by which you are told you should be moved." It's a simple yet profund statement and I'd have had a hard time putting it better myself.<P> As is already known to people with whom I've shared my thoughts on religion and spirituality, I'm a proponent of disorganized religion. I think that one of the worst things that ever happened to humanity, spirutually speaking, is the codification of prayers and beliefs. In the days before widespread reading and writing, prayer evolved constantly simply because they had to be memorized and recited without the benefit of semi-permanent text; the history of prayer was the world's largest game of Broken Telephone. In many ways, it was probably easier to be religious in such days -- not just because you didn't have the sciences to provide an alternative belief system, or because the priests might burn you at the stake if you disobeyed, but because your prayers changed and adapted to the situation each and every time you made them. Once prayers started getting wrtten down and codified into books, the whole process stops being spontaneous and starts becoming more formulaic. Is it any surprise that after a few hundred years of that, a lot of the old devotions have lost their meaning?<P> Maimonides, influential Jewish thinker after whom many hospitals and hospices worldwide are named, added his own thought: "Prayer without devotion is not prayer... He whose thoughts are wandering or occupied with other things ought not to pray. Before engaging in prayer, the worshipper ought... to bring himself into a devotional frame of mind... not like one who carries a load, unloads it, and departs." In a similar vein, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi wrote that a true worshipper "does not pray in a mechanical way, parrot like, but utters every word deliberately and thoughtfully." Both of these men, it must be said, predated the printing press, to say nothing of literacy in general. Devoutly faithful leaders of their community in an era where the congregation's True Faith could probably be taken for granted, they still foresaw the problems that come from making prayer 1) systematic and 2) work to be done. This is exactly how I've always seen synagogue: as a burden to be dreaded while it's coming, lifted painfully while it's there, and dropped as quickly as possible, not to be thought of again for one lunar year. This year, during Rosh HaShanah services, the rabbi actually made a comment to the congregation about how he knows that most of the people present don't know enough Hebrew to fully understand what they're saying, and when I looked through the author's introduction to our prayer book, it said the same thing there. I'm sure that some of the people who were in that building with me deeply and earnestly believe in their prayers to the exclusion (in proper moderation) of everything else, but as with every year, the level of background noise (from people in the aisles who spend most of their time talking to their neighbours rather than their god) was significant and omnipresent. It astonishes me that so few people see anything wrong with that.<P> That's all in sharp contrast to my own private religious beliefs, obviously. I'm with Quote Number One way up in the first paragraph; the right prayer is the one you feel, not the one you merely say. I don't think that Forsteri or Eris want me to sit in a temple saying their name and repeating endlessly how wonderful they are... as long as I mention it three or four times a day on my own time, they're satisfied with that. The last thing that would please Forsteri, a god of creative expression, would be meaningless formulaic recitation. As I sit here right now, I'm writing words as they pop into my head and John Williams music is pushing my pulse up to one hundred and sixty beats per minute and my brain up to one thought per second; I'm venerating the gods in the truest way I know. Here, in my sanctuary, surrounded by music I can feel in my heart and the icons and relics of my people (the geeks and the gamers, naturally), I can feel strong... purposeful... holy. That's one heck of a feeling. It pleases me to no end to know that Maimonides might have approved. I can only hope that Elazar ha-Kallir would too, but if he wouldn't, I can live with it; Elazar was a poet, but Maimonides was a doctor. <P> I'm not saying that the way I pray is *better.* I'm just saying that it's better for me. The downside of my way, of course, is that not as many people can do it with me. There's something to be said for being in a packed synagogue and knowing that eight hundred people are reciting the same prayer as you... but there's also something to be said for being able to get that feeling of holiness in the comfort of your own home. Disorganized religions could never have conquered the world the way Christianity did; we could never mass the manpower and the unquestioning dedication. If organization was the worst invention ever devised by a faith from a spiritual point of view, then the premise of "my way and only my way is right" was certainly the most brilliant idea one ever had from an economic and expansionist perspective. More numbers and less faith or smaller numbers with more faith? I can't say which is better, objectively, but I know which one is making me happier at this exact moment, and I know which one makes me feel really, really out of place in any synagogue. <HR> <a name="538"></a> <U><B>Something Old, Something New</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "Your computer looks like it's hooked up to a giant potato." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> Here's what I personally find is perhaps the single weirdest thing about the hospitals where I work: the contrast between the ultramodern and the decrepit. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of absurd things about the hospitals -- the fact that medical students who can't sign prescriptions are responsible for people's lives, or the fact that the nurses can help themselves to over-the-counter medications like tylenol but not give it to patients without a prescription -- but this one, to my mind, really stands out. Right this moment, for example, I'm sitting in one of the medical conference rooms, a modest office set aside so that health care teams can hold meetings or have a place to come work. The room is equipped with two respectable computers -- both running windows 2000, but they run it fast -- and a reasonably new printer. These computers allow us to access medical data from most of the city's major hospitals at a moment's notice and let us bring up x-rays without the need to have actual films brought up from the other wide of the building. On the other hand, on the wall to my right, there are a bunch of wall-mounted lights, specifically so that if you do have x-ray films, they can be stuck up and examined. The contrast here is that these computers, while admittedly probably not manufactured this century, are basically new, whereas the x-ray wall-mounts are at least twice as old as me and slightly more useless to the doctors. <P> To really underline that basic theme, to my left there's an ancient blackboard and directly above me is a plaster ceiling with so many cracks in it that it's a wonder the people in the office above me can't see me. <P> A hospital, of course, has a certain image it has to maintain. It has to be respectable; it has to be clean; it has to be high-tech. Not to put too fine a point on it, a hospital has to be shiny and new. What the hospital doesn't want people to notice, and what most people make an effort to avoid seeing, is that "new" is often a rather thin disguise. It's expensive to replace an old and shabby-looking but still strong and srvicable concrete wall; it's much cheaper to stick a brand-new polished desk in front of it and hope it covers the cracks. That's doubly true in rooms where the public doesn't habitually go, like the staff conference rooms. It's a skillfully woven lie, one all the more effective for the fact that people really want to believe it. If you don't choose to look at the details, you can forget you're in a two-hundred year old building, but then there are the departments which have only unigendered washrooms because when they were built it was never imagined women might walk through the doors, and there are auditoriums where the back of every seat has an ashtray because every doctor smoked and the only question was what brand they preferred. Obviously, I of all people aren't criticizing this; it's a well-wrought lie and a socially positive one, but it still makes for some truly absurd contrasts between, say, this-year's-model MRI machine in one room and the mumified corpses of generations of dead spiders in the next.<P> The thing about the hospitals, at least the ones where I've been, is that they've got limited money but effectively unlimited requirements. Above and beyond needing to be able to afford advanced machinery and testing equipment, a hospital needs to be reasonably clean and functional. Areas which are still in decent shape don't tend to get overhauled, particularly if they're old conference rooms which patients never see and so don't need to look like the interior of a starship. In such conference rooms, you'll often find top-of-the-line computers with superfast internet connections alongside forty year-old windows and a thermostat that's been broken since Montreal was part of the British Empire. The medicine floors sit about midway up the priority list, so they're kept very well equiped and well-cleaned but not necessarily upgraded. The radiology department, in contrast, which seems a very high traffic of civilians each day and furthermore has to regularly have cutting-edge technology put in, looks like it belongs in another, much more expensive building. If the medical floor looks like a community hospital, the radiology department looks like the hospital a few miles away that only lets you in if your wallet exceeds a certain minimum weight. If you were to look at these two floors side by side, you would swear that they aren't in the same building.<p> Then you go down one floor from radiology and you're in the really ultramodern department: the cafeteria. Everything is sleek, streamlined, maximally efficient, spotlessly clean, and covered in Starbucks logos. That's progress.<P> By no means am I saying that contrast is a bad thing. Balance is an important thing in life, and it's no good to be either too super-modern or too behind the times. Personally, I love a good jarring contrast; a little psychic speed-bump now and then helps us to keep our perspective, or if nothing else, our appreciation for the sublimely incomprehensible. I have no desire to work in a building that's all rounded plastics and antiseptic -- those areas of the hospital don't feel like they've got any character or personality. That said, I also like being able to check my email while I'm at work, especially if I'm on-call and not currently busy, and that takes a certain degree of modernity. The system that lets me bring up any x-ray at a moment's notice, for example, that's a system that's truly priceless; at hospitals where they haven't got that system, which includes several in Montreal, getting a hold of a single x-ray, especially after hours, is a Quest in and of itself -- from where I sit now, it would be out the door, down two halls, down fifteen floors (thirty flights of stairs), walk down a quarter mile corridor, do a u-turn througn three doors, then wander around to find a phone so that I could call a security guard to open up the records room for me. Instead, I open up one computer program, put in my password, and look at the pretty pictures. The modern and ultramodern certainly have their place (to be certain, I wouldn't mind if the chair I'm sitting in right now were a little more ultramodern, or at least had a little more back support). Sure, this hospital could certainly benefit from upgrading their painful elevators, but I think I actually prefer working on a floor where there are surfaces that aren't coated in false-wood plastics. Call it a matter of personal taste, or maybe call it a case of cognitive dissonance helping me find joy in working in a substandard environment. Either way, I've got a computer here with me to keep me company and the cool breeze coming in through these ancient windows feels lovely. There are worse places to be. <HR> <a name="537"></a> <U><B>Overtime</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "Is that the time? It's later than I thought it was." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> I find Daylight Savings Time, as a concept, to be both interesting and amusing. On the one hand, we tend to think of time as being the one true juggernaught of nature -- no one can stop time, there's no way to turn back time, and so on ad nauseum. On the other hand, twice a year we prove ourselves fools for believing that, as, based on nothing more than an off-hand comment made by Benjamin Franklin hundreds of years ago, we decide, as a people, to change what time we think it is. That's really a fascinating thing if you think about it. Western society lives and dies by the clock -- get up on time, catch the right bus, make it work, keep your appointments -- but it also proves every Spring and every Fall that time, like so much of the things we think of as being concrete reality, is really to a degree a matter of perspective.<P> Fun word, that, "concrete." Webster defines "concrete," the adjective, as "characterized by or belonging to immediate experience of actual things." What people sometimes forget is that "concrete," the noun, is something is solid, durable, wholly artificial and by definition shaped by conscious decision. <P> An extra hour is a funny thing. We don't add an extra hour to the day, the way we add an extra day in February; we just repeat an hour we already did. I suppose that since most people sleep through that hour -- barring Halloween parties, in which case an extra hour is probably put to very good use -- it doesn't usually affect their lives very much. Me? I just happened to be on-call at the hospital the night that we set back the clocks, and so my otherwise twenty-five hour shift was actually twenty six hours. I have no cause whatsoever to complain; it was very busy night at the hospital and I was just barely finishing all my work by 1:30am, by which I mean, the second 1:30am of the day, so when I collapsed into bed and, with my typical incomprehensible good fortune, didn't get disturbed by a single phone call all night, the extra hour meant, for me, an extra hour of sleep, and the difference between sleeping for four hours -- not enough -- and five hours -- a satisfactory enough amount. I do feel more sorry for the senior resident with whom I was working, because he was still up and working hard when I went to bed; my extra hour of sleep was his extra hour of stress. It might have also been his extra hour of sleep; I honestly don't know if he ever went to bed or, for all I know, was kept up all night (it was that kind of evening at the hospital). Interestingly, though, I spoke to the doctor supervising me and I spoke to a half-dozen of the nurses who were on the floor at midnight, who ran the specrtum from fresh-out-of-school to antediluvian, and not a single one of them actually knew whether they were getting paid for having an extra hour to their shifts. It's a question that never occurs to most people, who aren't on the clock at that hour, but for anybody on the night shift, as they are regularly and as I am once approximately once a week, that's a difference of a meal out at a restaurant or a few novels.<P> Quite frankly, I'm less surprised by the fact that they didn't know and more surprised by the fact that until I pointed it out the question had never occured to them. And really, why should the question have occured to them? Time, after all, is immutable. Most of the time.<P> The additional annoyance, above and beyond the whole screwing-with-the-laws-of-physics thing, was resetting all the clocks in my life. These days I carry around so many electronic devices that it's a wonder I don't distrupt nearby computers with my own electromagnetic field. Particularly when I'm on call, I'm typically carrying with me my cellular phone, the floor's cellular phone, my pager, sometimes the doctor's pager, my watch, and who knows what else. When I get home, there's then the two clocks in my apartment. All of these clocks need to be changed manually, as opposed to my computer which at least has the good graces to update itself for me. More fun is the fact that each and every one of those clocks is set to a slightly different time in the first place -- which is, obviously, a whole other rant about the meaning and subjectivity of time -- and the delicate balance between them is all-too-easily disrupted if my watch and bedoom clock (normally set to Imperial Standard Time, GMT-5.05) are no longer the right offset relative to my computer (UTC-5) or the hospital clocks (UTC-5+/-0.133bar). These things can throw off a schedule terribly, as you might imagine... if I'm a minute behind schedule getting to Grand Rounds, for example, all the free ham croissants might be gone.<P> For my part, I'm quite glad I was working the shift with the extra hour. I think I prefer to have the extra hour rather than to have one less hour, although that's taking into account my bias since I got to use it for bonus Slack; if I was doing a surgery rotation I probably would have been working straight through the night and cursed the fates that handed me a call that night. My real complaint, though, is that by all rights we really should have been setting the clocks back an hour last weekend and not this weekend. As people reading this probably lready know, the U.S. government a few years ago decided to extend Daylight Savings time, starting it three weeks sooner and ending it one week later, and Canada, being Canada, copied them. Because DST had been extended, the extra hour landed on the Halloween weekend, extending countless parties all over the world. Had DST not been extended, we would have set back the clocks last weekend instead -- and Topin Wagglegammon would have officially been "The Day So Nifty, They Made It An Hour Longer." Life is, as we all know, full of these little disappointments, but at least once in a while it also lets us get an extra hour of sleep after a hard day's work. <HR> <a name="536"></a> <U><B>Pumpkin Season</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "I think they want candy." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> The <I>Codex Dolosus</i> has this to say on the subject of costume parties. The costume party, the Codex asserts, is one of the most curious of all celebrations. It exists in a sort of delicate Schrodingerian balance between truthfulness and deceitfulness, embracing both while not truly being either. On the one hand, the express purpose of the costume party is to conceal, disguise, and hide one's true appearance from others -- it is one of the few examples of institutionalized lying, and more over, one of the very few settings in which the greatest, most outlandish, most impossible lies are those most rewarded. On the other hand, the Codex argues, it is encouraged and perhaps even expected that otherwise hinest people take pains to hide their natures behind fanciful dress at costume parties; if you know that someone is telling a lie, and they know you know, there one might argue that there is at no time the *intention* to deceive and, thus, no lie. The meaning of the interaction depends exclusively on the context ascribed to it by any two individuals interacting at any given moment, and so from moment to moment and doubly so when more than two people at a time are involved in a social interaction, it is always difficult even for the people involved in an interaction to say, authoritatively, whether their conspecific is lying to them. For that matter, most people wearing fancy dress at such parties probably could not say for certain themselves whether they are lying or not. At this point, the <I>Codex Dolosus</i> begins laughing so hard that it falls over, dislodging any bookmarks that have been placed in it, and the reader invariably loses their place.<P> On a semi-related note, Mr. Webster reliably informs us that "een" is an archaic English word of uncertain origin, most commonly used as a suffix, which literally means "an inferior fabric resembling a specified fabric (as in, 'velveteen' or 'valvoleen'); an inferior imitation." Hallow, of course, is a word from Middle English, obsolete except amongst fans of medieval fantasy, which means to make holy, to set apart for holy use, or to respect greatly. Thus, we have "halloween," which logically and quite appropriately can be taken to mean "to venerate inferior fabrics and imitations." Which is, indeed, what costume parties are all about.<P> It can be argued that there are two, perhaps two kinds of people who dress up at costume parties: the people who dress like other people, and the people who dress like themselves. In either case, they are liars. Most people attend costume parties dressed as someone other than who they are -- fictional characters, abstract concepts, famous politicians, and other improbable and non-credible things. A psychodynamic theorist, of course, would argue that people most commonly dress up as things or people they would like to be, and so it is indeed debatable whether or not most of them really go dressed as themselves, or at least, what they wish they were. In contrast, there are other people who tend to dress up as things they already feel they are but which, for reasons of socialization or embarassment, they cannot usually dress as. No matter the case, they are all liars: people who dress up as something they are not are lying by appearing to be something they are not; people who dress up as what they wish they were are lying because they are claiming to have qualities they do not; people who dress the way they see themselves deep down are lying on every other day of the year when they fail to show up in costume. Whatever the case, as soon as someone puts on a costume, they are a liar; they are either lying at that moment, or they can suddenly be said to have been lying yesterday and will be lying again tommorow. We can perhaps accept that people who wear sardonic or self-referrential costumes aren't really lying, because their costume is precisely what they think they are not, but this is a level of subtlety and sophistication which is quite beyond most people.<P> There is no question, then, that Halloween is the Day of Deceivers. It is the day of wearing masks and the day of dressing up as someone else and the day when we hand out tangible rewards to the people who can do it the best. Moreover, it's the one day of the year when people walk up to us as ask us, outright, for a trick. Young people are handed candies and sugary foods, the better to fire up their synapses and get them plotting and scheming. Even its name proclaims that it's the day when we venerate inferior copies of things. The better people lie to us, and greater the rewards we heap upon them; things they would be mocked or arrested for doing in July are praised and admired in October. The day is a public service; on that day, even the most honest and upstanding person gets society's permission to lie. Best of all, because it's a party season, it's perfectly accepted that the festivities will run, not only on the day in question, but also during the weekends preceeding and following... not only do we have a day dedicated to lying, but we lie about when it is and how long it lasts. It doesn't end at noon like some holidays I could mention... it lasts from the day the candy goes on sale to the day the candy runs out, with a grace period of a few days in either direction. You have to admire any holiday which is so adaptive... I'm constantly having to adjust my schedule and alter my plans to accomodate other holidays, but Halloween conveneiently makes itself available whenever I've got time to commemorate it. <P> It's just fortunate that we have such a day for limited times each year; my life would be much less fun if everyone was a trickster all year round. <HR> <a name="535"></a> <U><B>Mountsylvania</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "Forest? What forest?" <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> One nice thing about working in Internal Medicine at the Montreal General is that the conference rooms and nursing stations' windows all face North. Directly to the North of the hospital, of course, is the bloody great mountain after which Montreal is named. The mountain, at least in this particular area, is covered by trees, to the degree that it sits somewhere between being a park and being a forest; paths and walking trails crisscross these areas, but there are places within in where you can stand and, despite a city of three million people spreading out from your position in all directions, you could forget you're in an urban area. From the inside, the park is no doubt lovely. From the outside, and specifically from the 15th floor (nine floors up from ground level thanks to the bright idea somebody had decades ago of building a hospital on a mountainside) where I have the opportunity to look out upon it, the park is breathtaking. The trees ascend up the mountainside in chaotic rows with the foliage of each tree obscuring the trunk of the one behind it. Autumn has touched them, and a thousand subtle shades of red and orange form a flaming wall rising up from Cedar avenue all the way up to what was once the highest point for scores of miles in any direction. Two hundred feet of rising, multi-hued tree forming a veritable ocean of colour dominates the landscape. The mountain is merely beautiful in the summer when it's green and vibrant; in the fall, it's a work of art and it's almost enough to make you believe there's a loving god.<P> All that being said, when I look out the window, it's mostly to point and laugh at the people trying to parallel park outside the hospital. The trees are kind of interesting too, I guess, if you like that sort of thing. I personally much prefer the view to the South, which faces the Montreal skyline from 15 floors up; at nighttime, the window is filled with a sea of patterns of multicoloured lights stretching off as far as the eye can see. As long as I can forget the fact that it's all filled with swarming masses of humans, it's a stunning sight. From the South side, though, you're much too high up to watch people parking.<P> I enjoy people-watching. Lots of people enjoy nature programs on television, or standing at a window and watching the squirrels play. They enjoy watching inferior life-forms at play, and that's why I like to watch humans. The street outside of the hospital isn't that great a place to watch people doing interesting things -- entertaining as it is to watch people cross the street and put money into parking meters, there's only so many times you can observe "man pausing at crosswalk" before you're able to guess what will happen next. Conversely, I mostly don't enjoy watching people drive; the road outside the hospital is straight and narrow; the good drivers never have reason to do anything interesting except slow down for jaywalkers, and the bad drivers are no fun to watch because no mater how hard I focus my will they never seem to explode (which doesn't stop me from trying, naturally). Parking, though, is something different. I personally find parallel parking to be an extremely annoying process, far more difficult than it ought to be and usually more frustrating than it needs to be. I am and always have been a poor eyeballer of spacial dimensions, so when I'm trying to park, I spend half the time guessing distances and the other half second-guessing myself. The parallel parking spots on the street outside of the General are curious in that they're absurdly large; they're a good foot wider than they need to be and, for whatever reason, almost half a car-length longer. This makes them very easy to drive into while also leaving lots of room for people to do all sorts of ridiculous maneuvering trying to get into them just right. It's surprisingly endless fun to watch people trying to get into the spaces and then shift around in them trying to place themselves absolutely perfectly. I don't know why it's so interesting to watch... probably part of it is that on any given shift at the hospital I'm going so crazy with taking care of patients that my tired brain latches on to anything that isn't work-related just to give itself a break. <P> Case in point, I'm writing this while I'm on an on-call shift at a quarter to midnight, now having been on-the-clock for over sixteen hours and with another ten or so ahead of me. My brain feels moderately fried, but I've still got enough cognitive power in me both to enjoy watching people park their cars outside and to write a post about it. It may not be my finest literary work, but then, it's also not that fellow's finest parking job (or if it is, he shouldn't have a license). <P> In any case, the closer we get to winter, the fewer leaves remain on the trees, the uglier their wooden skeletons become, and the less interesting it will be to watch people trying to park, so I'll probably be spending much less time looking out the window in the coming days than I have in the past ones, and thus more time, I dunno, working or something. This will be a loss for me, of course, but my supervisors will probably be pleased to hear it. Opinion amongst my patients is likely to be divided, especially amongst those who have their own North-facing windows.<P> Postscript: And, sure enough, the next day I wake up at 7am, look out the on-call room window, and see that we've had the first snowfall of the year and all the trees are just plain white, wet, and yucky. Sometimes I hate the Universe. <HR> <a name="534"></a> <U><B>Lucky Days</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "Well, that could have gone worse." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> I've observed in the past that I believe I'm a lucky person. I don't necessarily draw the right cards when I play poker and I have yet to win the lottery, but in general I've always found that events in life have a way of falling into place for me. I have a knack for being in the right place at the right time to meet the right people, overhear the right conversations, and get assigned the right shifts at work. I've been known to say that it's because Satan loans me his luck when he isn't using it, but I only say that around people who I know will take it the right way. The truth is, I don't think that I was born lucky... I believe that my phenomenal luck is directly atributable to the fact that I venerate two gods who consider probability to fall within their purview. Forsteri, in particular, I have always felt make an effort to help the dice fall for me in a good way and it's certainly made my life easier. Ask anybody who's played D&D: life gets a whole lot easier with a god on your side.<P> On the other hand, as gods go, there's no question: Forsteri isn't particularly mighty. I've beheld a few events in my life that I'd classify as miracles, but they were small miracles from a small god, and certainly not "parting of the red sea" or even "water into cola" level stuff. I've always suspected that Forsteri's ability to bring me good fortune is partly an ability to twist the probabilities a little bit but partly an ability to take advantage of what I call "the law of conservation of fortune." Energy, as every good physicist (and even the bad ones like me) knows, can never be created or destroyed, but remains perfectly constant in the universe. It changes form, changing from, say, potential to kinetic to heat, but the same amount of energy still exists, minus that lost to friction/entropy. I suspect that to a degree luck works the same way... good luck that you're supposed to have today can be moved to tommorow where you'll need it more, such that you get lucky tommorow but your luck remains relatively neutral today. The absence of good luck doesn't have to be *bad* luck; if you think about it, most situations in life have good, bad, and "stagnant" or "boring" outcomes. Bad luck can be moved around the same as good luck, and again, the absence of bad luck today doesn't necessarily imply that the luck you will have is actually any good. I wouldn't want to wager my life on this theory -- I'm fairly sure it's false, in fact -- but it does seem to explain how my life works some days. I've had four on-call nights at the hospital now, for example, and I slept peacefully right through three of them without being bothered at all, which is phenomenally, impossibly good luck if the kinds of nights that my colleagues typically have is any indication. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that the days leading up to those on-calls have tended to be quieter or even more negatively lucky than other days; large volumes of my good luck from earlier in the days is being shifted to my nights, where I'll need it more. The actual amount of luck consumed stays the same but the times at which I get them changes.<P> This theory also does a nice job of explaining the last couple of days. Forsteri clearly took most of my good luck from October 24th and 25th and moved it to the 26th. I've thus had a very long few days culminating in a lovely Topin Wagglegammon.<P> Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were long days. The hospital was crazy; my patients required a great deal of work, mostly administrative (as opposed to "interesting" or "worthwhile"). On Friday night I had a very complex last-minute admission who proved to be two hours of wasted work when, before I've even finished her paperwork, she crashed and had to be sent back to the Emergency. On Friday night I discovered that my computer had somehow picked up multiple Spyware and pop-up-ad programs despite the fact that I had done no recent downloading for several days; how the programs got onto my computer, I will never know. In my efforts to eliminate the spyware I must have done something wrong because the next morning when I turned my computer on it reached the log-in screen and then rebooted itself over and over; even starting in safe mode or resetting to last functioning settings didn't fix it, and my comuter is now sitting at the dealer's and waiting to be seen by a technician who will probably charge me too much money just to reinstall the operating system (and that probably won't eliminate the spyware). I'm writing this now, once more using my mother's laptop, the same one which saved my sanity in Chisasibi but which is noweher near as nifty as my own beloved machine. So, long few days.<P> On the other hand, nothing's been catastrophic, at least for me. Troubles at the hospital have been frustrating but, to me personally, not horrible. My computer is currently non-functional but is repairable and I have every reason to believe that I won't lose any files that were on it. And, on the up-side, because all my bad luck for Saturday night and Sunday has already been consumed, the last 24 hours have been excellent. The gods clearly stepped in and gave me an unpleasant Friday and Saturday so that my Saturday night and Sunday, my Topin Wagglegammon, would be appropriately nifty. Indeed, it's been a great last few hours and it makes the stresses of the last few days totally worth it -- assuming I do get my computer back within a week and haven't lost any irreplacable documents; I haven't backed up my personal files since February, after all. On the plus side, believing that two gods are watching you and helping you also helps you feel more confident that even when your computer won't boot up the data on it will be safely returned to you.<P> As a last thought on the topic, for Topin Wagglegammon this year, some weeks back I composed a thousand-word epic poem all about how the holiday cam about. While transferring some files from my data key to my computer, I accidentally erased it. I painstakingly rewrote it, coming up with a work I thought was much inferior and, somehow, was three hundred words shorter; it isn't getting posted today because, understandably, it was on my computer. Clearly, someone somewhere really did not want this poem getting posted on Topin Wagglegammon itself and was willing to go to extreme measures to make their will known. Once the niftyday is passed, I'm confident the poem will be returned to me and will be posted here sooner or later. In the meantime, other stuff.<P> Happy Topin Wagglegammon to everyone! Never let it be said that a bad day yesterday should have the power to stop you from enjoying today, especially when today is The Niftiest Day of the Year. <HR> <a name="533"></a> <U><B>The Price of Happiness</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "I'm moderately fond of books." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> For years, McGill university's main library has hosted a big book sale in late October. When I say it's big, I'm actually making something of an understatement... the sale lasts for twenty four hours spread out over two days and thousands of people from all over Montreal flock to see the thousands of books being sold. Some of the books are texts that the library no longer wants while countless others are donated by ordinary people who, for reasons quite beyond me, choose to give their books away. Last year was the first time I ever went to this sale, and I was sufficiently awed by it that I've spent the whole past year looking forward to it. Last year, I only heard about the sale about half an hour before it ended but still managed to run over because it's held about five minutes from my apartment; most of the good stuff was gone and I found nothing at all good, although I did mistakenly buy copies of <I>Dracula</i> and <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i> before I noticed that they were "student-friendly" horribly mutilated versions and gave them away as gifts. This year, I had the good fortune of being on-call the night before the sale, which means that instead of working at the hospital the whole day and missing the entire first day of the sale, I instead finished my 26-hour shift at the hospital a bit before 10am and got to the book sale about an hour and a half into it -- at which time, despite being 10:30am on a Wednesday morning, the building was filled to near overflowing by the crowds. Was it worth the trouble to get there so early, fight the crowds, and stand in the lines? For 16 dollars, I bought 12 novels. One of them was a near-mint copy of Max Brooks' <I>Zombie Survival Guide</i> which itself usually sells for between ten and twenty dollars. Not only was going to the sale worth the trouble, but I'll probably even go back tommorow after I finish work. Book sales come perilously close to my vision of heaven.<P> Arguably, I didn't need to buy any of these books. For example, amongst others, I today picked up a complete copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, complete with index and appendices. It's nearly twelve hundred pages and weighs close to four pounds and was obviously last owned by someone who either only read it once (and probably not the whole way through) or else took exceptional care of their books. This is not a book you keep in your pocket to read between classes; this is a book you use as ballast on a zeppelin, or perhaps to crush the skulls of your foes on an ancient battlefield. The odd thing is, I don't actually like the Lord of the Rings. I disliked the books the first time I read them, as I've discussed in this space before. That being said, I've always believed that there are certain books that a complete geek's library ought to include, and ever since I moved out, it's amused me to very slowly accumulate some of those books (as cheaply as possible, of course; I don't pay ten dollars for a book I'll never read). I've wanted to buy a complete Lord of the Rings trilogy for years, but I've never done so because it's hard to find the books being sold for the price I'm willing to pay (read: a dollar per book or less). In this case, I paid four dollars for the set of three -- the extra dollar being justified by the fact that proceeds from this book sale go to a good cause and not merely to line some pocket somewhere. Even at most used book stores, one would expect to pay that much for even just one of the three books, so I'm quite happy to have paid a dollar and thirty three cents for each, plus an extra penny for the convenience of having them all in a single volume. I still don't like the books, but it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to have added something nifty to my collection, and it's going to keep giving me a smile for the forseeable future whenever I see it on my bookcase. If I had spent the four dollars on coffee or beer, it'd be gone by now... even if I never read the books again, as is likely, I've still got something concrete which will sit on my shelf and look pretty.<P> The same logic cannot be used to justify the omnibus of 6 James Bond novels I bought for three dollars. I'm a fan of the James Bond movies and I've always wanted to try reading some of Fleming's original books, but buying a bound set of six of them was probably a bit of overkill before I know if I like his writing. Then again, "fifty cents per book" justifies a multitude of sins. I regret only that I may never finish reading the omnibus, because it's so heavy that it hurts my wrist to hold it if I read while lying on my back as I usually do. And if I drop it, it'll probably break a few of my ribs.<P> Perhaps the most amusing thing about the sale wasn't the books that I bought, but the books that I didn't. There is a certain logic to the supposition that when you go to a used book sale, most of the books you see there are books that other people no longer want... McGill mostly accumulates the stock for the sale by soliciting donations, and persumably people are more prone to donate the books they don't dearly love. Fortunately, some people do give away books that actually interest me, but by and large, I've always taken it as a given that most of the books you see at a used book sale are there because somebody thought they weren't any good. It amuses me, therefore, to have observed the distribution of books. I must have seen at least twenty copies of <I>The DaVinci Code</i> scattered around along with various other books by the same author. There were a lot fo bibles on sale, most of them very cheap. There was, I kid you not, an entire pile of <I>The Celestine Prophecy</i>. There was no Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman anywhere to be seen, although I did find a collection of twenty year-old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks hidden in a box under a table in a far-off corner. Draw what conclusions you will.<P> Now, the countdown begins to the sale next year. It's good to have things to look forward to in life. <HR> <a name="532"></a> <U><B>The Nectar of the Gods</b></u><p> <blockquote><I>"A few cups of this and I bet I could work for six days straight, too." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> I like to think I haven't got too many addictions. Sure, I may go into convulsions if I go twenty hours without checking my email and I may be unable to go to sleep if I don't read at least one page of a novel, but I've managed to avoid becoming hooked on the things known to be the most addictive on Earth. I've never started smoking, for example, probably the single strongest addiction in the world, and I've always resisted the urge to try either of the things tied for second-most-addictive, being crack cocaine and World of Warcraft. Perhaps the single most prevalent addiction amongst my current workplace colleagues, though, as well as being the hardest addiction to break, is one of the most insidious ones of all: coffee. Caffeine is thought in medicine to be the drug with the most addicts in the world, which isn't so obvious to most people because the withdrawl effects aren't lethal (merely very unpleasant) and because the high it gives you is relatively minor. In any case, it would not be wholly innacurate to say that everything in most Montreal hospitals (and centers of higher education in general) would grind to a sudden and agonizing halt if all coffee became suddenly unavailable one day. Pity the poor resident who's on the tail end of a thirty-hour shift at eight o'clock in the morning and has another two hours of work to do before being able to go home who finds that they can't get a cup of coffee before going talk to the same patient for the fifth time that day. Gods help the patient who needs an emergency test done in the next twenty minutes if nobody in the lab can get a shot of liquid wakefulness. The medical students, of course, are for the most part rendered helpless and defenseless without it, unable to cope with their early morning rounds even if they're fresh from a good night's sleep and a month away from the nearest exam. It would be kind of sad if it wasn't so funny. It's also hard to be appropriately mocking of their dependence after today when, in a moment weakness and in the face of necessity, I succumed.<P> Today, I had a cup of coffee. There's no going back from this.<P> Despite having spent the last nine years of my life in post-secondary education and the last three months actually working in the hospitals taking an active part in patient care (often before the sun has risen), I have never yet become hooked on coffee. This isn't due to any great bravery or resilience on my part, but simply due to sheer bloody-minded stubborness; I've never gotten into the habit of drinking it. In fact, I've avoided coffee where possible, refusing to even touch the stuff under almost any circumstance. The reason for this can be summed up in one word: tachyphylaxiphobia. Admittedly, the only reason it can get summed up in one word is because I just made that word up. Tachyphylaxis is the phenomenon whereby the body slowly builds up a resistance to a toxin when exposed to it in small doses over a long period of time; it's why people who take heroin need to take more and more of it over time to get the same effect and why you can spend two years building up immunity to iocane powder. Caffeine is a drug for which the body undergoes tachyphylaxis; the more you drink it, the more you need to drink to get the same rush. I've avoided coffee because I knew that when I started working crazy hours in the hospitals, I'd want to still be as vulnerable to coffee's effects as possible so that minute (read: inexpensive) doses would still hit me with maximal potency. To that end, I made it through CEGEP, an undegraduate degree and the first years of medical school without taking any coffee except for a small amount mixed in with my hot chocolate on mornings when I had a very early exam and felt particularly awful. It's been a long, hard struggle, but not only have I largely abstained from coffee, I've proven that it's possible to be a good student without the aid of mind-enhancing beans. I've also gotten to have a lot of practice at forcing myself to be functional through sheer force of will, which is itself a very useful skill.<P> All that being said, I was at the hospital this morning for 7:20am, before the sun could be meaningfully said to be up in the sky, with a patient who needed his discharge paperowork complete in the next three hours, a long and boring meeting to sit through from 8:00 to 9:00, a poor night's sleep behind me, and a headache pounding in the front of my skull for the fortieth hour in a row. As I sat in the meeting at 8:30 having genuine difficulty keeping my eyes open, it suddenly occured to me that I'd always said I was waiting until I was in the hospital at ridiculous hours before I resorted to drinking coffee... and I've been working in the hospital for three months now.<P> So, at a break between two speakers, I got up and grabbed a cup of coffee. I might not have done it, but it was free.<P> Now, it really must be qualified that, by the standards of most people I know, I didn't exactly get a "cup of coffee." What I did get was about two fingers splashed into the bottom of a small paper cup, and then a whole packet of pure sugar added to that to make it palatable. It wasn't especially strong coffee, either -- not that I'm one to judge, but I was able to tolerate the flavour, so it can't have been that strong, and I could still see the bottom of my cup through an inch of it, so it certainly wasn't as strong as most people I know like it. As caffeine goes, it would probably have been a sub-therapeutic dose for most people. To my caffeine-naive body, it made the perfect pick-me-up; I felt much more alert without getting overly hyper or developing heart palpitations or something like that. It was also nice to have something warm and sweet to drink -- it was almost, but not quite, like having a cup of tea. It must have done something to me, if only through the miracle of the placebo effect, because I made it through the rest of the day feeling reasonably awake, and my headache disappeared until about two in the afternoon (just in time for me to have an hour of paperwork to do followed by an hour and a half meeting). Overall, it was a fairly positive experience as drug exposures go, and I might repeat the experience... the next time I'm in a situation where I can score free coffee. <HR> <a name="531"></a> <U><B>Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day Part 3</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> "Dude, you've got something green on your shoulder." <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious </blockquote></i><P> <left> For the third year in a row, I Took My Cthulhu To Work on October 16th. In theory, Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day is meant to be an Eccentric day, meaning that it gets celebrated on a different date each year, but in practice October 16th just keeps being the most convenient date for me to celebrate it, year in and year out. Next year, perhaps I'll get lucky and the 16th will fall on a day when I'm home and so can't take my Cthulhu anywhere special (maybe just Take My Cthhul Grocery Shopping or something) and I'll have reason to celebrate it on the 17th or 15th or maybe in early November just for the heck of it. This year, for better or worse, it was once more celebrated on the 16th, and I have no one to blame but myself.<P> One of the important distinctions between a niftyday and a holiday is, of course, that if you celebrate a niftyday on the wrong day, very few people get mad at you. If you celebrate Christmas or Yom Kippr on the wrong date, you get, at best, strange looks and inconvenient questions. This is because those holidays have, at their core, a religious or national meaning, and so it's not only assumed that everyone knows when the holidays are, but that no one in their right mind would celebrate them "wrong." Sure, you can have your Christmas party on a night other than the 24th (25th?) if that's more convenient for you, but try showing up at the synagogue the day after Yom Kippur and trying to recite Kol Nidre and trouble follows. My feeling is, if god doesn't smite me for celebrating a day wrong, I don't see what business it is of anyone else's, but as we all know, the judgements that others make of us are rarely grounded in open-mindedness and thorough fact-checking. This is what makes niftydays easier to celebrate in some ways. A niftyday is, by definition, a day which has never had any religious significance whatsoever. Even Haloween is grounded in spiritual practices which have deep meaning to some people, but no prophet has ever made a deep and moving speech about Give A Present To A Wall Day (with the possible exception of me, but if I'm a prophet of any sort, it's with one of those "any resemblance to actual people is purely coicidental" sort of disclaimers). When you celebrate a niftyday -- such as, for example, Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day -- nobody in the world is going to care if you celebrate it on the wrong day. For that matter, precious few people in the world are going to care that you celebrated it on the right day, and if your bosses are the narrow-minded sort, you might be best off not celebrating Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day at all. When the major Jewish holidays roll around, they're a major source of stress for my mother, because she has to spend hours, sometimes days or even weeks preparing food for feasts and seating for guests, all while not getting any time off of work the way Christians do when their major holidays come up. If you're planning to celebrate Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day, the first great advantage is that nobody expects you to put that much work into it, but the second and even greater advantage is that, if you haven't got that kind of time to dedicate to the project, you can postpone it until a week when you've got more hours free. Can't find the time to Take Your Cthulhu To Work in October? Do it in January after you've had a week off for the other holidays! Downside is, of course, that you can't have a million people celebrating it with you, but then again, with a little bit of planning, you never know. <P> All that being said, some days still deserve to get celebrate on the right date. Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day is an eccentric niftyday and meant to be a little bit disrespected, but Topin Wagglegammon is October 26th and that's just the way it is.<P> Actually, to be perfectly honest, Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day didn't attract very much attention this year. Last year on that date, Cthulhu came with me to all my lectures and sat on right next to me, learning about... I don't remember, the pathologic basis of some disease or another. Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day is easy enough to celebrate when you're just going to a lecture hall (and when, let's be honest, you're a person whose classmates already think of as being a bit odd). Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day is something entirely different when you're actually bringing your Cthulhu to work, being, a place where you're required to dress respectably, act maturely, and obey a clear chain of command. For some odd reason, many employers fail to appreciate the importance of celebrating Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day. They fail to understand the importance of propitiating Unholy Cthulhu as a means of delaying the day when the Old Ones return and thus prolonging the lifespan of the human race as a whole, and seem instead to look down on employees who bring plush toys to work with them. If I was working at the Children's Hospital I might be able to get away with it by claiming that it wa sa toy to amuse the little babies, but considering that Cthulhu isn't particularly cute and, indeed, inspires dreams and nightmares that drive men mad, this probably wouldn't go over well. In any case, I was stationed at the Montreal General hospital at the time, working in Internal Medicine where there are no children at all but, to my good fortune, the doctors have a decent sense of humour and a sufficient appreciation for absurdity, and as long as I kept my Cthulhu tastefully understated in a pocket or something, I was able to satisfy the Great Dark One while also coming across as charmingly playful rather than in desperate need of a visit to the psychiatry department. Everybody's happy... particularly me, since I get fodder for yet another post.<P> Happy Take Your Cthulhu To Work Day! Stay tuned to this space to find out if it gets celebrated on the same day again next year. <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; //-->