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 581-590<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/501-600/591-600.html">Entries 591-600</a><BR> <a href="#590">Entry 590</a> April 12 2009<br> <a href="#589">Entry 589</a> April 9 2009<br> <a href="#588">Entry 588</a> April 6 2009<br> <a href="#587">Entry 587</a> April 3 2009<br> <a href="#586">Entry 586</a> March 31 2009<br> <a href="#585">Entry 585</a> March 28 2009<br> <a href="#584">Entry 584</a> March 25 2009<br> <a href="#583">Entry 583</a> March 22 2009<br> <a href="#582">Entry 582</a> March 19 2009<br> <a href="#581">Entry 581</a> March 16 2009<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/501-600/571-580.html">Entries 571-580</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="590"></a> <U><B>Selective Holiness And the Bread it Confuses</b></u><p> A couple of days ago was the first full day of Passover, which is significant because it's a short interlude between the two huge feasts which define the holiday. Passover is a relatively big deal in my family, certainly compared to the amount of effort we put into celebrating the majority of Jewish holidays. As far back as I can remember, both sides of my family have always made big, elaborate feasts for the first two nights of Passover, inviting the extended family, friends, inlaws and so forth to partake, and these meals have complied with varrying degrees of the highly ritualized and structured laws of the seder, the Passover meal. These days, we tend to focus more on the meal and the family than we do on the ritualization, but we still prepare the proper symbolic plates, recite most of the main blessings, and tell the minimum amount of the story of Passover required so as not to be punished by god. All told, it's not a pair of nights I look forward to; the company is nice and the food is usually pleasant but it's a lot of work to go to and it runs far later into the night than one might wish, especially if, as was the case this year with the second feast, the lengthy ritualistic portion only begins after 7pm and I have to be out bed the next morning at 5:30 so that I can make it to the hospital in time to start my 26 hour shift.<P> One of the main features of Passover, of course, is the prohibition against eating leavened grains for eight days. I won't go into the complex rules regarding what is and is not proscribed during the week-and-a-bit, but suffice it to say that I won't be eating anything with bread in it for that period. Strictly speaking, according to the Bible, bread products are only dissalowed if they've been allowed to rise, but the rabbis have always been unecessarily paranoid about interpreting religious law and so, broadly speaking, the rule people use is that the prohibited grains should be consumed only in the form of unleavened matzah, just in case they leavened slightly. Despite the fact that my family is of Ashkenazi origin, I choose to follow the Sephardi tradition wherein even though one avoids products made from wheat and four other grains, one can still have rice, so I'm still able to eat that, and the consumption of oats is contentious but I've laid in a supply of maple-flavoured oatmeal anyway. It means that I'll have to forgo my usual weekend pizza, and when I see my friends for D&D this week I'll be severely restricted in terms of what food I can order. In any case, it's only for eight days, so it's an effort I'm prepared to go to, and I'm just lucky to be working at the Jewish General Hospital during that time so that I can get kosher-for-Passover meals while I'm on-call. <P> The really odd thing is that I'm keeping the Passover in the first place, given that it has zero religious meaning for me and that at some point in the eight days I'll almost certainly eat a matzah and ham sandwich.<P> It's actually utterly illogical for me to care about the Passover rules, particularly given the amount of effort required to do so when traveling in circles where no one else does. Ordering a meal is hard at this time of year, causing me considerable annoyance a least three or four days out of the eight. For example, at this moment, I'm at the hospital, working late; it's about ten minutes to 5pm and I'm just starting to get hungry. Less than ten feet away from me there is a box full of Double Pizza crazy bread, which I love, paid for by one of the residents when he bought everyone lunch today (pizza, which I couldn't eat). Even though I'm hungry enough for a snack, I'm not touching the crazy bread, because it's leavened... which is absolutely ridiculous from any point of view except that of a religious Jew. I fast on Yom Kippur, but drive and use my computer on the sabbath. I don't keep kosher in any other sense of the word, happily taking unkosher meat and then mixing it with milk for good measure, and it's safe to assume that before the end of Passover I'll have made some sort of matzah and ham sandwich; the irony will occur to me, but I won't care. There's really no good explanation or even rationalization for it. I can shrug the issue aside by arguing that I've always been able to pick and choose which rules I want to bother with and which I want to ignore, but in a perfect world, I'd be able to come up with some deep, personal, insightful explanation. It would amuse me very much to be able to justify why I keep the Passover rule but not any other aspect of kashrut.<P> So would a giant elepenguin, trampling cars in the parking lot outside as it dances to the tune of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire." That's not going to happen either. Instead, I explain it by the simple and ancient rationale of "it makes my parents happy." There are worse explanations, but many that would be more inherently satisfying.<P> Actually, it might not be that non-sensical. I have no problems mixing meat and milk because the Bible actually tells us not to "boil a goat in the milk of its mother" which the rabbis take as an injunction against mixing meat and milk but which I personally take to mean "don't add insult to injury," or perhaps "when accomplishing a goal, try not to do it in the single most monsterous way possible." I always did feel that the rabbis over-generalized things a little bit. This logic doesn't excuse my happily eating ham, which the Bible does specifically, clearly and unambiguously forbid; that point, I can only counter by touching my thumb to my nose, wiggling my fingers, and going "nyah nyah nyah." <HR> <a name="589"></a> <U><B>What is Luck?</b></u><p> One of the most basic tenets of Silinism is and always has been the premise that, by applying sufficient will and belief, an individual can change the world. This has two parts. First, I do honestly believe that to a degree the Universe is morphic, responsive to people's thoughts and beliefs, and that if a person believes hard enough than even the very laws of physics could conceivably change. Clearly, this does not happen often. On a much more practical level, though, there's no question that a person who believes intensely in something is more likely to put more energy into making that thing come true, and furthermore, is more likely to make the necessary attributions and assumptions necessary for a thing to appear to be true. Two of the mightiest powers of all sentient minds are the powers of rationalization and cognitive dissonance; together, they become the mind's ability to make any ridiculous and horrible situation somehow fit into a pre-existing worldview. <P> On that note, here's a question that's been on my mind for some time now: what, precisely, is luck?<P> I've become incresingly interested in the concept of luck in the last year. Looking back on my life, I've always had a certain degree of good luck, but it's really only in the last year -- specifically since my rotation through Family Medicine back in August -- that I really started using such phrases as "having the devil's own luck when he isn't using it" and "always been unnaturally lucky." Since I've started working on-call shifts at hospitals, I've really had reason to brag about my stupendous luck to the people around me. My calls are almost always easier or less painful than the calls of other students, to the point that I've had residents compete to be on call with me because they believed they'd get a quieter night. There's no doubt in my mind that I'm an irrationally lucky person, as is only appropriate for the chosen servant of two gods, both of whom consider the manipulation of probabilities to fall under their purviews. It begs the question, though, what exactly is luck? History and literature are full of people who are born lucky or unlucky, fortunate or cursed. Despite the fascination people have with luck, nobody has ever come up with a sensible way to quantify it, nor aeguably even to reliably qualify it. Webster, for example, defines luck as "a force that brings good fortune or adversity; the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual." As is so often the case with Webster, it's seemingly clear and straightforward while actually saying nothing at all (every year, I become increasingly convinced that Webster's Dictionary is actually written by Vorlons). Luck, as a concept, is clearly something that's neither good or ill; it has to be deemed to be "good" or "bad" before it has any meaning. Look at that definition though. Luck is "a force." It "operates." Webster is usually quite precise, but those are surprisingly active verbs to use, almost implying direction and purpose. I'm not saying that any of the Webster editors are closet Tyche-worshippers (though it is, of course, not impossible), but rather that the way in which we today conceive of luck, and the way we formulate it with our imperfect conceptual language, tends to assume that it's exactly what Webster calls it: a force, almost an active process. This sort of thinking, of course, makes statisticians break out in cold sweats or fits of apoplectic rage. <P> As I see it -- and whether I've put a lot of thought into this or only a tiny amount is really a matter of perspective -- luck is comprised of two potentially equally imprtant parts. First, there's what we might call luck proper. Luck proper is the part that most people don't want to believe in but everybody hopes to have; it's the aspect of luck which we imagine is some mindless, faceless force that brings us good outcomes and material wealth. Rolling sevens on two six-sided dice in a game of craps is luck proper; rolling a natural 20 is luck proper given context and good comedic timing. This sort of luck is undeniably important and certainly very useful, and I honestly believe that I've been blessed with a plentiful supply of it. We're thinking animals, though, and as I said above, I think that cognitive dissonance is one of the mightiest of all of the mind's powers, and as I see, there's a second component of luck: cognitive attributions. Let's illustrate with a story.<P> One day while in my obstetrics rotation, I was tasked with giving a presentation in front of a group of doctors. Because it was a powerpoint show, I was carrying my data key with me. In obstetrics, we wear scrubs at all times, and I therefore had my data key in the pocket of my scrubs rather than, say, in my backpack, or in my jeans, or at home. I gave my presentation but didn't have time to return the key to my locker, and so it stayed in my pocket. It kept slipping my mind to put it somewhere safe for the whole day, and so in my pocket, safe enough, it stayed, and I checked on it many times during the day to be sure I still had it. At the end of the day, I went up to the locker room, changed clothes, tossed my scrubs into a laundry hamper, and went home; I had gotten off the bus twenty minutes later before I realised that I never had taken ym data key out of the pocket of the scrubs. I immediately turned around, hopped on a bus going the other way (which was conveniently right there, almost as if it was waiting for me), rode back to the hospital, raced back to the sixth floor, found the laundry hamper I'd used, and rooted through some six pairs of scrubs until I found mine, retrieved my data key, put it safely in my backpack, and went home, getting back close to an hour later than I should have. The question is, was this a lucky story or an unlucky one? Let me break it up into how my instrict is to see it.<P> I gave a presentation; neutral event. I kept my key with me during the day and didn't drop it; neutral event. I forgot to take it out of my pocket when I left the hospital; a stupid mistake, hardly attributable to bad luck because it was my own dumb fault. The bus was right there so I didn't have to wait; good luck, not something over which I had any power. The laundry hamper hadn't yet been emptied; possibly luck, possibly not, because I don't know what time the hampers get emptied by housekeeping, but it certainly felt lucky because if it had been emptied my key would have been lost. I had to dig through many pairs of scrubs; neutral event, because I certainly could have had to dig through more than I did, or they might have been dirtier. I found my key; partially attributable to luck, but also to my own good sense of realising where I'd left my key. So, the overalkl impression is of a time when I nearly lost a valuable data key, but retrieved it, with the only cost being a loss of time and some frustration, but was it a case of good luck or bad? The chief negative event was due to something that was in my power to change; the chief positive event was things not in my power to change. To me, then, it feels like there was no bad luck, but ample good luck. I nearly lost my key, but I didn't; I got lucky. What this got me thinking about should be obvious.<P> I like to tell my classmates that my calls are always quiet, and the truth is that objectively I tend to have fewer crises/admissions and tend to get more sleep than my classmates, night after night and shift after shift. Equally objectively, I still have nights when I get no sleep at all because there's so much work to do, and I have nights when I'm bothered by annoying family members, and I have nights when patients crash or even die on me. Somewhere in my brain, though, there's a little switch that instinctively attributes good events as "good luck" and bad events as "inevitable, and obviously not bad luck." The end result, as you might imagine, is the development of a personality which believes with all its heart that it's one lucky bastard. <P> Am I truly lucky, or do I just have above-average powers of rationalization? Am I simply lucky to have delusions that are satisfying instead of depressing? From my point of view, which is obviously biased, I think there's ample objective evidence of my incredible luck, but I'm sure that subjective factors contribute. I also suspect that the fact that I think I'm lucky makes me inclined to see luck where others might not, which in turn makes me feel ever luckier. The way I choose to see it, I'm just lucky to have reason to ask that question. <HR> <a name="588"></a> <U><B>Malpresentation</b></u><p> This morning, while waiting for the bus, I watched a squirrel climb up the side of an eight-storey building. I've never seen a squirrel scale the side of a large building before, and to be honest I had no idea that their claws were capable of finding purchase in concrete. Of course, the heart of downtown in a major metropolitan area is not an ideal environment for any squirrel in the first place, and this creature almost certainly subsists most of the year on garbage rather than nuts and berries, so perhaps it's adapted to urban life. I first noticed it scurrying along the ground outside of the building, an apartment complex, and paused to watch it. It scurried to the side of the building and stopped, then started to scale the wall. It would rise up about two storeys then stop; perhaps it was tired, not being used to slimbing more than one tree-height at a go, or perhaps it was confused by the absence of leaves and knotholes. In this manner it reached the top and vanished, only to appear again, its fuzzy nose appearing over the side of the building, looking out across the cityscape. Was it looking for predators? For food? Was it surveying its territory, as any proud monarch should? Was it looking down, wondering how to descend safely from so high up? The nose vanished and the bushy tail appeared, and I watched the tail as it zipped quickly along the artificial cliff, pausing now and again. I continued to watch it until the tail reached the corner of the building and, following the wall's edge, vanished from my sight. It did not reappear; whether the squirrel never finished the circumference or whether the bus arrived before it did, I'll never know. I suspect that the concrete of the building is not an amenable surface to a squirrel's claws, and that it would not be able to gain enough purchase to make it back down; the creature is thus stuck atop the roof, where it will starve, or else, will try to get back down and likely plummet some sixty to eighty feet to the hard ground below. I'm truly sorry that I'll never know its fate, because it was a very cute squirrel, and if nothing else I have tremendous admiration for the fact that it managed to scale the entire building.<P> I'm uncertain if this story is related to my the fact that I'm currently finishing my rotation in obstetrics. If it is, it's buried in such a depth of twisted metaphor that I would need an army of mole-people and a nuclear-powered drilling machine to find it.<P> It feels quite odd to think that I've spent the last four weeks of my life helping to deliver babies. Above and beyond the simple facts of the very odd places where I've had my hands and the variety of unusual liquids (amniotic fluid is surprisingly sticky) which have splashed onto my shoes in the last month, the mere fact that I've been helping to bring about life somehow boggles the mind. Don't get me wrong; I have no problem with life in and of itself and I'm not averse to helping newborns to live, since by definition they're young enough that they have yet to do anything to slight me personally. I'm not a big fan of people in general, and it makes me ambivalent to know that I've facilitated increasing their number. I choose to look at it as doing my part to increase the amount of chaos in the world, as few lifeforms are more chaotic and unpredictable than very young humans. I also choose to think that perhaps some small contribution I make might help set some of these babies on the "right" course in life -- wishing the mothers luck, referring them to social services, providing a friendly face, and when all else fails, drawing the Goddess' attention to them by beeping them on the nose (I can now live the rest of my life with the satisfaction that comes from knowing that somewhere out there in the world, there's a human being who I was the very first person ever to beep their nose). Sometimes, it's the smallest contributions which can change the world thirty years down the road, after all.<P> Before starting this rotation several friends -- all women -- spoke to me about how wonderful, magical, and beautiful the process of birth is. I can now say with authority that this is propaganda. The process of birth is long, painful, messy, and squishy. On the plus side, this may be the most pleasant patient population I've ever worked with; the babies are too young to fuss, the mothers are by and large too happy and tired to be demanding, the vast majority of people are happy to talk to a friendly and smiling medical student, and I the only time I spend more than ten minutes at a time with any of them is when they're under anesthesia and I can see their intestines. <P> On a related note, today I felt what the front surface of someone's spinal cord feels like. If you don't see why that's an interesting experience, think about it for a moment. I may complain a lot about my program but I do continue to enjoy the experiences it offers that I would never get elsewhere.<P> Being honest, though, the truth is that there actually is something nice about being present at the birth of a child. I doubt that any patients I saw during this month will remember me down the road, but I hope that they'll at least be able to look back and remember that there was someone there who asked how they were, answered their questions and wished them good luck. It's probably a priviledge to be there at one of the moments which many of these people will look back on as being among the happiest moments of their lives. It's another item to put down in the "things most people will never do in their lives" scorecard. It's good to have experienced it and I'm glad I've had the opportunity to learn the answers to some of the questions that, for example, my brother might be asking me when his kids are on the way. It's a priviledge to have had this chance to study obstetrics and help bring life into this world. Still, it's a priviledge which I'm ready to be done with now. <HR> <a name="587"></a> <U><B>Sitting On The Dangerous Chair</b></u><p> The other night I found myself once again in conversation with a classmate, something which is clearly becoming a bad habit of mine. You would think that as long as these people have known me most of them would know better than to try to sit with me and talk to me, but apparently some of them continue to pursue this odd behaviour. The conversation came -- though I can't recall how -- to having purpose in one's life and, as it relates to me, the Quest for the Chocolate Monkey, which was a driving purpose of my life for a decade and which was fulfilled, with help, in July 2007. Understandably, it's always a bit tricky to explain to most people why finding and eating a chocolate monkey was a significant event in my life -- and even harder to explain why it took me more than ten years to do it, or why it became a big deal in the first place. I actually slipped into my story-telling voice, which is highly unusual for me to do around classmates (in their vicinity I've usually got way too much psychic armour) and put on what I thought was a very moving and impressive retelling of the whole story, and I believe I made it suitably epic that I at least entertained my classmate. Still, I don't think she was left understanding the depth and meaningfullness of the whole issue, in part because I found myself unable to explain what separates a quest from a Quest (unable only due to time constraints, not due to lack of imagination). It makes one ask, what is it that separates a simple goal from a life's purpose? Perhaps it doesn't make anybody else ask, but I've got a deadline to produce a thousand words and nothing better to do for the next ten minutes.<P> What is the difference between a goal and a Quest? Any time I add a capital letter to something, it's meant to denote a certain degree of significance. Webster defines a goal as, amongst other things, the end toward which effort is directed. That's simple, straightforward, and dare I say it, mind-numbingly obvious. In contrast, Webster defines a quest (with a small "q", mind you) as an act or instance of seeking. Notice the difference in the focus of those two ideas. A goal, so sayeth the dictionary, is something for which you strive -- it's the end towards which you work and the result you aim towards when you set out to accomplish something. A quest, in contrast, is the *act* of applying that effort... the quest is the act of the search, and never the result of the search. A quest can certainly be expected to have a goal, and for such an epic and loaded word we'd expect it to have a relatively impressive goal, but I suppose that someone given to sufficient melodrama could quest for a bottle of soda, for an address, or for the nearest washroom. Now, let's take a second to add another level of unecessary flavour to that idea, by putting the capital letter back in. A Quest is any quest which has particular meaning and importance, subjectively speaking. A quest for a bottle of soda might be an arduous task -- back in my days at Concordia, for example, the nearest soda machine to the games club was a good five minutes walk away across a dark, scary, and often snow-covered or jock-infested courtyard, and if any of us wanted to go buy a Coke (or gods help us, a coffee) during a game it was indeed a relatively large expenditure of effort including such requisite elements as a journey disproportionately large for the goal and some minor dangers and obstacles to overcome. That said, getting that soda isn't a life or death quest and failure means nothing more than a bit of transient annoyance. A Quest is the same principle, but for a suitably important goal -- a priceless object, true love, spiritual fulfillment, or maybe just a silly little piece of chocolate which time and an excessively powerful imagination have made larger-than-life. The chocolate monkey was a Quest -- not because it was important, but because I'd been seeking it for almost half of my life. So, the short answer is, a Quest is nothing more than the expenditure of effort to attain a goal, but where that goal is one of major subjective significance. The source and good sense of that significance is largely irrelevant.<P> There is, of course, a second important aspect to that idea. A quest, in myth and storytelling, is more than just "an instance of seeking." Webster goes on to further add such qualifiers as "a chivalrous enterprise" and "an adventurous journey." Again, these additions further reduce the importance of the goal and more strongly emphasise the path to reaching that goal. A quest is defined, not by the goal, but by the route taken to that journey, and as Joseph Campbell might observe, it is the growth and evolution of the seeker which makes the quest truly significant. A Quest (or the object of the Quest) becomes a valid life's purpose when, in pursuit of that Quest, the individual grows, becomes better than they were, finds deep and meaningful experiences and affects the lives of others -- or at least tries to do some of those things. The Quest for the chocolate monkey gave me something to always think about, always try to find ways to work towards. It gave me a smile when I thought about it and it gave me something weird I could tell people about to get a smile out of them. And, in the end, something which I certainly could never have seen coming when I adopted the Quest a decade ago, fulfilling the Quest actually entailed falling in love with an amazing woman and proving myself worthy of her love, to the point that she was willing to go to the effort of making the monkey for me. Even if I'm no longer in that relationship, it was still one of the best times of my life and that day remains one of the most wonderful of that time. If that's not something worthy of the culmination of a Quest, I don't know what is. <P> Sadly, I didn't have time to mention any of this to my classmate, so she probably just thought I was crazy. Which, I suppose, isn't wholly innacurate. <HR> <a name="586"></a> <U><B>What Do Harry Belafonte and Claudia Christian Have In Common?</b></u><p> The other night I did something very unusual for me: I sat in a hospital cafeteria and had a conversation with a classmate. If I was the person I want to be, this wouldn't be something at all unusual, but I am what I am, though I continue to strive to be better than that. I wouldn't have sat with her except that she, for whatever reason, chose from a literally empty cafeteria to sit at my table and strike up a conversation. The conversation wove through a number of topics but, as conversations with me are wont to do whether I mean it or not, it found itself returning, inexorably and even despite my own efforts, to one single question... "who are you?" To my credit (perhaps my shame?) I didn't actually ask her the question a single time, but rather I talked a bit about how asking this question is one of the driving forces of my life (particularly having sit down to watch "Comes the Inquisitor" yet again just a few days ago... a few days prior to writing this, anyway, not prior to when you're reading it quite some time later). My classmate put forth an interesting idea which had never occured to me in quite the way she formed it. Obviously, anyone who wants to understand who they are must come to terms with who other people believe them to be... who people think we are shapes how they treat us and how they act around us, and how people interact with us always changes the way we see ourselves. The subtly different way in which my classmate formulated this thought was as follows (albeit rephrased in my own inimitable linguistic style): given that everyone is extremely biased about their self-perceptions, and thus it's perhaps fair to say that nobody can ever form a really objective self-perception solely from introspection, <B>it might actually be more accurate to judge who someone is according to who everyone else thinks they are than who they think themselves to be</b>. Yes, it's a statement with some logical holes big enough to drop pianos through, but it's still a point of view from which I'd never approached the question, and that made me stop and think about it for a second.<P> Since I've got Babylon 5 on the brain these days, a quote I've always liked very much: "It pleases me that you care for what I have become, but never forget who I was, what I am, and what I can do." I think that speaks for itself, but then again, I know the context. I have no clue if it makes sense to anybody else. Fortunately, I also don't care. So anyway...<P> I agree that it's difficult for someone to be objective about who and what they are. I like to think that it's not impossible (mostly because if that was the case it would invalidate the major purpose of my existence) but I wholeheartedly agree that it's hard. I'm a moderately arrogant and self-centered person, prone to exagerate my own strengths. I'm also very conscious of my own flaws and equally prone to believe those to be exagerated far beyond what they actually are. It's likely that in my perceptions I exagerate my brilliant writing skill and my unnaturally good luck, just as there's no question that deep in my soul I'm a more empathic and caring person than I tell myself that I am. Depending on one's point of view, I'm either much more of a bastard than I think I am, or much less of one, and you could never take my word for it which is the case because I'm biased beyond all recognition. On the other hand, I'm also a deceiver and an adaptive sort of person, with completely different patterns of behaviour depending on whether I'm at home, with friends, with family, or with patients. My patients have almost universally reported to my supervisors that I'm an unusually empathic and caring person... which is very much not how I see myself. I can make myself appear to be empathic because I think I'm deficient in that trait and thus overcompensate when I'm with a patient, but this means that there is a big discrepancy between who they think I am and who I think I am. I've always felt that it's the inner feelings which really define the "real you" but the case could be made equally well that if I spend a significant portion of my time showing empathy, even if it's deliberate empathy, that I am therefore an empathic person. Does intention outweigh behaviour? Does it make a difference if the behaviour is performed for ten minutes a day or for ten hours? Because I believe that "benevolent deceiver" is one of my core traits, maybe it's not such a big question in my unique case -- every display of empathy is perfectly in character because it's a lie told for the betterment of the world -- but in an otherwise honest person such discrepancies might be very hard to reconcile. Certainly, the only way I can judge who anybody else might be is according to my perceptions of their behaviour -- the precise standard which I would vociferously insist is the wrong way to judge me.<P> It's at this point that I get confused and fall down.<P> The biggest problem that I see with the idea is that, if I judged myself exclusively or primarily by how I'm perceived by others, I wouldn't like my own life very much. For the bulk of my life, I was the "unpopular kid" in any given social context. I got on great with my family but I pity the person whose true Nature is the person the idiots in my gradeschool and highschool believed me to be. If I believed myself to be the person the bullies in my schools thought me to be, I'd probably have ended my own life years ago, because I couldn't stand the idea of thinking so poorly of myself. It behooves me to observe at this point that this is probably the exact mechanism behind a lot of people's depressions and other illnesses: they do, indeed, base a large part of their self-image on what others -- the wrong, biased, and ill-qualified-to-judge others -- think they to be. Maybe the only reason I've got the ego that I do today is because, perceived as I was by my classmates in childhood, I had to learn to define myself as the opposite of whoever they thought I was. If that's the case, then the best thing that ever happened to me was being bullied because it made me the Emperor I am today, but I'm just as biased as anybody else. That is, *if* it's the case, which I'm not strongly inclined to believe, because in many ways I've proven to be exactly who those kids thought I was: a non-conformist, an arrogant intellectual who thinks he's better than other people, and a social misfit. More likely, the truth lis somewhere in between, and as with everything else, it's a question of Balance.<P> I know that my self-perceptions are biased. In some ways I think I'm better than I really am, and in a lot of ways I think I'm worse. Do my biases make it impossible for me to see myself objectively? A good journalist would tell you that there's no such thing as true objectivity. I think that as long as we work hard to be aware of what our biases might be -- even if we fail to correct for them -- then we can still get a moderately accurate idea of ourselves. I also think that this moderately accurate picture can be, though is not always, a better idea of who we are than an outside observer to form. I could be entirely off-base and deluding myself, but at least I'm aware of the possibility and openly admit to it. I am, after all, someone who's very able to admit that they might be wrong, even if other people don't think I seem like the type. <HR> <a name="585"></a> <U><B>The Carriage Held But Just Ourselves</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> Why must I fear the inevitable? Why must I fear the end of suffering? No, I fear reaching my end with plans yet unfulfilled. <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, Appendix IV: Words of Consolation</blockquote></i><P> <left> Lately, I've been contemplating death. Not my own, though this wouldn't be particularly unusual for me, but that of other people. This, I blame on the television show "Scrubs" and a clip from one of the last episodes in the series which a classmate sent to me via YouTube. In the clip, the main character ruminates on how long he remembers the names of patients he's lost. While I have yet to kill my first human -- as far as I know, anyway -- I have had some of my patients pass away while I was their primary health care provider and I've also been on-call when patients died, making me the first person on-scene and the one to pronounce death. After I watched the clip, I stopped to think about it for a moment. I can remember the name of the first patient I lost, but I can't remember the name of the first person I watched die. Granted, I'm the first to admit that I've got a terrible memory, but I suspect that years from now this may be one of those things I look back on and regret not having written down when I had the chance. <P> I haven't lost a lot of patients in my life. In point of fact, to the best of my knowledge at the time of this writing, two patients have died while my name was listed next to theirs, though it's practically guaranteed that some of the other older/sicker patients who survived my care have since passed away in the following months. Both patients I lost passed away during my two months of internal medicine... one in the first month, one in the second, which I might add is a higher survival rate than many of my classmates. I don't attribute the higher success rate to any sort of skill on my part; I'm a naturally lucky individual and my patients tend to do well, on top of which medical students tend not to be assigned the sickest/most acutely ill patients on a ward. The two patients I have lost were what hospitals call "expected deaths," meaning deaths which were seen coming a mile away and which the doctors had decided to do nothing further to prevent. The first man to die in my care was actually a young man, younger than my parents, dying of heart disease; living in perpetual pain and too short of breath to do much more than shift his own weight in bed, I can remember his name mostly because it was the same as a major character on Star Trek, though on reflection now I can't seem to remember his first name. Sick as he was, he made the decision to give up and requested that all care be withdrawn from him about halfway through my four-weeks on his ward, and as near as I can figure it he died while I was at home playing Dungeons and Dragons. Which reminds me what his first name was, since it was the same as one of the players in that game. I quite clearly remember the last time I walked out of his room; I wished him a good weekend and said goodbye and I'm confident we both knew I'd never see him again. Medically speaking, I did nothing at all to help this man; he was dying long before I ever met him and nothing we could have done at the hospital was likely to change that. I do think that I provided him someone sympathetic to have around in his final days and I hope that made things a bit easier for him; apparently one of the last things he ever said to another living soul was to tell the attending physician that he'd thought quite highly of me and said I should get a good grade. I remember it being a very bittersweet feeling to come in on Monday and see his name had come off of the patient roter; he was nice guy and it actually hurt a bit to know he was dead, but he'd also been suffering and had gotten what he wanted. I find it hard to mourn someone who felt ready to die, and choose instead to honour him by remembering that in the few days I knew him he seemed like a cool guy (though not someone I'd ever have become friends with if we'd met while he was healthy). <P> The second patient I ever lost was an older man, in his late seventies. When he came into my care, he'd already been on the ward for several weeks and was dying of very widely-sprad cancer. In the space of a couple of weeks he went from a cognitively-intact bed-ridden man to a hallucinating, incoherent bed-ridden man. Unlike the first patient, he was a bit harder for me because, though he'd lived a longer and richer life, I have no idea if he had come to terms with his deth, or if he even understood what was happening at the end. I won't describe how his decline went because that would almost certainly violate some principles of ethics and confidentiality, but it was a bad way to go, very much the way I fear dying myself, especially since to this day I don't know if his only visitor, a man who lived in a neighbouring apartment, was really a friend or just a vulture who contrived to get things left to him in the will. I can remember his last name, his first name, the odd nevi he had growing on his skin, and the strange hand gestures he made in the air above himself while hallucinating. Still, for all that I find that today I feel less emotion over his death than the other fellow.<P> All that being said, when both of those men died, I was comfy and at home. A patient I admitted to the hospital did die during my time in internal medicine, but he had been assigned to another student after I did his admission. A man suffering from an extremely rapidly-progressive cancer, he entered the hospital and left it in the space of a few days, but died on a night when I was on call, and so when his breathing started to fail at 3 in the morning, the nurses called me. He was still alive when I got to the room but clearly would not be for long. At the family's request I stood by the bedside with my stethescope for about five minutes as his breathing slowed and his heartbeat got quieter until both eventually stopped. It was disconcerting in its sheer anticlimacticness. Even though he was the very first person I ever saw die, I've been sitting here thinking about it and I can't remember his name, and can barely even remember his face. I remember only that he was Greek. I'll never forget being in his room that night, though, largely because I wasn't called for him dying but because one of his dozen visitors had collapsed and the nurses thought the visitor was having a heart attack (he actually just fainted, which I diagnosed in seconds but which the nurses didn't believe, and was fine by the time the nurses got him to the ER a few minutes later, but since the patient was minutes from death anyway I stayed at the bedside). You have to laugh... since the alternative is to go stark raving swirly.<P> So, on the spectrum of remembering versus forgetting, I guess that means I'm doing pretty good. Maybe I just haven't lost enough patients yet for their names and faces to all blur together, so give me time and we'll see what happens. In the meantime, it just goes to show that whatever else I may say, I do apparently have some real humanity in me, for better or for worse... but I still refuse to admit I'm part of your species. <HR> <a name="584"></a> <U><B>Sinus Trouble and The Meaning of Life</b></u><p> One of the great joys in my life is -- and has every reason to be -- learning new words. My great love of Webster's dictionary is no secret, of course, but what I don't often mention is that one of my favourite things about studying medicine isn't so much the aquisition of neat facts (fun as that is) but the aquisition of neat words, neat vocabulary, and neat insights into where some of those words come from. For example, today I learned the word "pleonasm" which means "the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense." This word isn't used much these days because it's been made redundant by words like "redundant" and in fact the first and thus far only time I've seen it used in a fairly well-read life is in an essay from a journal of otolaryngology from 1927 (why I found myself reading an ENT journal from 1927 is a matter which is better left unexplored but may none-the-less become clear over the course of the next six hundred or so words). What amuses me most about "pleonasm" is the fact that it rhymes with "neoplasm" which means, of course, the proliferation of tissues, and most commonly is used to refer to a cancer. You can imagine the laugh it gave me to note that if you spell it sideways then it refers to a cancerous growth of language. Despite the connection, the two words are completely unconnected in terms of their origin; it's merely an amusing coincidence, assuming one believes in coincidence.<P> Today, though, the word which interests me even more is the word "coryza." Technically, this isn't a new word in my vocabulary, as I first picked it up about a year ago, though I've since probably never actually had occasion to speak or write it. Coryza is one of those words which are useless to anybody outside of medicine; it's the technical term for the nasal symptoms associated with the common cold of seasonal allergies. Before today, I'd never bothered to wonder at the derivation of the word, but was prompted to by something I stumbled upon while looking up the word's precise definition while studying measles. In point of fact, coryza is one of the countless English words whose original source is no longer remembered, but two prevailing theories exist. The more serious theory, and the one suggested in Webster's dictionary, is that the word is derived from the Greek "koryza," meaning mucus or a runny nose. We can well imagine how that word would end up being the modern medical term for cold symptoms. This etymological supposition is very plausible and almost certainly wholly accurate, as well as being very, very dull. I much prefer the second theory.<P> Andrew Wylie was a physician way back in history when things like antibiotics were still more or less science fiction. When I first read his name I thought he was a famous doctor I had read about before, but it turns out that he simply has a name very similar to another, much more famous man who, unlike Wylie, is still alive. Wylie was no doubt a very good doctor but he seems to have never done anything of historical significance... in fact, he hasn't even got his own article on Wikipedia. Still, just because he never achieved much in the way of fame doesn't mean that he didn't have any importance and it certainly doesn't preclude people today uncovering his ancient writings and referencing, citing, or mocking them. In any case, while reading a text of his, I came across this:<P> <blockquote> "Coryza was an ancient Greek word denoting a fool; we use the term for a cold in the head, but the two are really synonymous; the ancient Romans advised their patients to clean their nostrils and thereby sharpen their wits."<P> </blockquote> Does this mean that picking your nose makes you smarter? That probably depends on how far in your finger goes. I suspect that, like many of the beliefs of the ancient Romans, this one was completely wrong, to say nothing of stupid. That said, the first part of the quotation is the part that caught my interest. I'm always curious to find new words that mean "fool." I'm doubly keen to learn words in Greek, since such words more often than not can be found to have had some influence on their English analogues and decendents. Case in point, it's not hard to imagine an English word which sounds very similar to coryza and has a meaning not unlike that of "fool," although as it happens, Webster doesn't give any theories as to what the etymology of "crazy" might be. I can imagine the sort of logical connection the linguistic evolution; having a cold certainly drives me crazy, and when I've got a blocked nose I know I sound like a fool (although if I were being honest [which is {of course} not one of my frequent flaws] I might admit that I sound pretty nasal even at the best of times). I hesitate to suggest that clearing my nose has ever restored to me any great measure of sanity and indeed it seems likely that if anything my craziness increases as I get over a cold and my energy returns. More importantly, since the medical meaning of coryza is realistically utterly irrelevant to whether it came to evolve into the word crazy, it's easy to imagine how a word equated with "jester" could grow to be used to refer to someone insane, and how the relatively complex pronunciation of a word like coryza might get softened over the intervening centuries to the much simpler crazy. I once read somewhere (or to be strictly accurate, heard in an episode of Doctor Who) that Johnathan Swift, author of Gulliver's travels, compiled a theoretical system according to which sounds tend to soften and change from generation to generation; I suspect this would support my theory, but since I've never been able to find the text in question and indeed am not even conveinced that it exists, I can't prove it one way or the other.<P> Meanwhile, while writing this, one of my nostrils was a little congested and the other was clear. I have no idea what implications this has but I'm sure they're important. <HR> <a name="583"></a> <U><B>In the Bondginning</b></u><p> Way back in October -- it feels like a tremendously long time ago given all of the ridiculous experiences I've had since then -- I went to the huge McGill used book sale. At the time, I felt this was a significant enough event to write a post about it (but then again, I'd write about tying my shoes if I thought I could crank out a thousand words about it). Amongst the other lovely books I bought that day was a collection of six of Ian Fleming's (and Kevin McClory's) James Bond novels. The omnibus included Moonraker, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Thunderball, and of course, Dr. No. It's a pretty good cross-section of stories, covering as it does some of the more memorable films (though not my favourite) and showcasing some of the series' best known villains. The first book in the omnibus is Dr. No, which makes some sense because this was the first movie to be made into a film, even if it was the sixth book. I've been slowly reading Dr. No for about a week now and finally finished it a couple of nights ago, and now I'm a good four chapters into Moonraker. I'm getting through about a chapter a day at most; because the omnibus is both heavy and huge, it's impractical to bring it with me to the hospital, and so I read it only at home before bed where it has totally failed to inspire interesting dreams. As I make this very slow progress through the book, I'm struck by two things. First, the film version of Dr. No is actually a surprisingly loyal adaptation of the novel, given how loosely are some of the other films based on the novels. Second, and more interestingly, Bond himself is an incredibly different character from that seen on screen. At first I thought that this might be because it was an early novel, and that the character might evolve into something more Connery-like, but this was before I looked it up and found it was actually already the sixth novel in the series. <P> Useless fact of the Day: In the film, the supposedly Chinese Dr. No was played by a young Jewish man from Montreal.<P> While I don't want to commit myself until I've read the relevant novel, it seems to me at this stage that the actor who most closely captures the original novel character is actually George Lazenby, which is ironic for a host of reasons that few people reading this know the series well enough to get right off the bat. This suggests to me that my readers have largely led more productive lives than I have. On a related note, Don Adams and Patrick McGoohan were way more on the money than I'd ever realised. <P> James Bond, the film character at least, is perhaps one of the most iconic characters in Western culture. If anthropologists two thousand years from now find themselves digging up our old films and toys in an effort to reconstruct our mythology, they'll likely think we looked at James Bond in much the same way that we imagine that the ancient Greeks saw Hercules. Bond is a near-universally recognised image -- no matter the actor, his image conjures up the idea of the suave, the debonair, the stylish and sucessful, the attractive, the casually violent, and the cold-hearted killer. The fact that he's been so widely and so effectively parodied shows how far his archtype has reached, and the fact that new movies using his name continue to be made shows that he's an archtype which has yet to lose his power. This is true for every actor who has played him with only minor variation; Connery was more the womanizer, Moore more the showman, Dalton more cold, Craig more brutal, but all of them, at heart, were clearly and inextricably the same archtype. All of them, that is, except for George Lazenby, whose Bond is gentlemanly, soft-spoken, a little bit of a bumbler, and actually not all that great with women, at least incomparisson to his other incarnations. It amuses me to no end, then, that I've come to think that Lazenby is the closest to the novel version of Bond; in Dr. No, at least, Bond is a lot more George Lazenby than he is Sean Connery. For one thing, the female character was introduced more than four chapters ago -- naked at the time that we meet her, propositioning Bond several times since then -- and he has yet to sleep with her merely because it would put them both in mortal danger. Clearly, this is not the way most of the film versions of Bond would treat a woman. <P> I've commented before on the fact that the average person knows what words like "Sisyphean" and "Sorcratic" mean but don't know much about the characters from whom we get the words. I consider this not too different. Until I read this novel I thought I really understood what this character is all about, and now it turns out that my least favourite incarnation of him might be the "truest" of all. I'm sure there's a moral here, but Plaug bonk me if I know what it is.<P> Of course, this begs a question that I, as a deceiver, find quite interesting: what is the real essence of the character? There's the original character, the version that the character was meant to be by his creator, and then there's this other version who's far and away more popular. Who has the right to say who and what a character is? Does the creator know the character the best, simply because he wrote the first lines of dialogue? Or is the public perception of him more what he truly is, because it's the version more widely accepted? Arguably, the public has shaped their vision of the character from the films, which have every claim to be as "true" a representation of the character as the books do except for the fact that they came second and changed lots of details. Which, then, is true: what the creator intended, or what the creation became when it got out of hand? <P> It also occurs to me that perhaps the different versions of the character are actually more similar than it looks. Dr. No was published in 1958, when the author had to put in dashes instead of rude words, whereas the film came out in 1962, when they could put in a lot more vulgarity and violence but a lot of characters who are nude in the novel wear clothes on screen. Those four years make a pretty big difference, culturally speaking... it was the transition from the proverbial fifities to the proverbial sixties. Quite possibly Fleming would have liked to write Bond as a mysoginistic killing machine but felt the public wasn't ready for it yet. We'll never know. I for one hope that Fleming would be proud of what's become of his most notable creation, but somehow, I suspect that if he *wasn't* happy with it, somewhere, somehow, that knowledge would Bond himself all the happier. Characters are funny that way. <HR> <a name="582"></a> <U><B>Lofty of Mien</b></u><p> Though not much of a drinker, I have a modest appreciation for two cocktails, the daiquiri and the fox poison (or, as it's sometimes known, the crushed smurf). Although quite different from each other, they're among the few drinks I don't utterly abhor and have even tried on more than a single occasion (though regrettably, neither one was present the single time that I chose to get drunk... it might have been a different night if they had been). I have a special place in my heart for the daiquiri on account of the ice cream chain Baskin-Robbins; when I was very small, they had a daiquiri-flavoured milk-free ice cream (presumably non-alcoholic, but looking back I can't be sure) which I loved and enjoyed countless times (when I learned, years later, that it was named after an alcoholic drink, I was surprised and oddly disapointed). The fox poison doesn't have any similarly formative childhood memories attached, but it's always amused me because, originally a Polish recipe, its proper name might be considered to be trucizna lis -- a remarkably appropriate name given that, thanks to my unique physiology, a few shots of it would probably kill me. Composed of entirely different base alcohols and differing utterly in terms of their colour, flavour, consistency, temperature and even recommended glass size, both of these drinks have one thing in common: both have, as a central component, a touch of citrus juice. Once you add the ice to these drinks, the juice, being of a lower density than the alcohol, rises towards the top of the drink and forms a nearly imperceptible film at the top, such that everything else in the glass can reasonably be called by one word: sub-lime.<P> Yes, I know: two hundred and eighty words just to set up for a single pun is in very poor taste, but really, it's your own fault for coming to read this. You know what you're getting every time you load this page. So anyway...<P> "Sublime" has always been one of my favourite words. Sadly, it's one of those words you don't get to use very often, like "hoodwink" or "defenestrate," words that have a great deal of beauty and inherent amusingness but which are regrettably limited in utility or else not understood by enough people to be an efficient form of communication. Call me a sucker, but I believe that the purpose of language is to convey meaning rather than obscure it; I realise that this places me at odds with the highest levels of academics and legalism, but that's my stance and I hew to it scrupulously (except for at those moments when it amuses me more to use an unecessarily complicated synonym). That said, as both a writer and an egoist, I believe that the secondary purpose of language is to be beautiful or moving. It has been said that the first purpose of a painting is to convey meaning and the second is to trigger emotion, and I think that this is equally true of language -- which is, like painting, an art form and an artistic medium. "Abstruse" is a good word to me because it conveys a lot of meaning and is, to my subjective senses, an inherently beautiful and pleasing word, made all the more so for the irony inherent in it (since it's a word most people would find difficult to comprehend). The perfect phrases and sentences -- which I don't imagine I often string together but which I flatter myself to think I have crafted from time to time -- are those which not only help share an idea but are also of surpassing loveliness in and of themselves. The perfect text would be beautiful to read even without taking in the meaning, just from the ebb and flow of the words and the sound of the syllables. Language can be and should be beautiful. It should, indeed, be sublime.<P> Webster's Dictionary defines "sublime" as "to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form." This just goes to illustrate my oft-repeated complaint that the first definition to come up in Webster is rarely the one I'm referring to. When I use the word sublime, I almost always intend to mean the noun, and not the verb, yet Webster insists on showing me the verb meaning first no matter how many times I reload the page. Before we do move on to the noun, however, it's worth pointing out that the second meaning of the verb "to sublime" is to convert something inferior into something of higher worth, which in retrospect could have been the central word around which I shaped really cool coat of arms text if I didn't already have one. In any case, we come at last to the noun form of sublime, which Webster defines as "1a: lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner; b: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth; c: tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence." It further elaborates that sublime implies "an exaltation almost beyond human comprehension." I can't speak for anybody else, but just reading that sends a chill down my spine (which would be more impressive if I didn't get the same effect from John William's <I>Theme from Superman</i> or the Green Lantern oath. Let's take a second to look at that. A sublime Thing is that which is exalted, worthy, even transcendent. Those are pretty strong words; there isn't a lot that I'd describe as transcendent, and I'm someone who's naturally given to overstatement and melodramatic exageration. A sublime work doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be something which is grand and awe-inspiring. It's a powerful word that describes a powerful concept, the sort of word which one might almost imagine coming with its own orchestral crescendo. It's a beautiful idea and, in my own opinion at least, an inherently lovely word, beautiful in appearance and sound as well as meaning and implication. Sublime is, indeed, sublime. It's rare when the Universe hands us something which is beautiful in both form and function; we should appreciate such congruence and not throw it away thoughtlessly. <P> It's also got something to do with what happens when you heat iodine over an open flame, but that has nothing to do with anything else. Don't know why I mentioned it, really. <HR> <a name="581"></a> <U><B>Boswith Salad and Other Culinary Atrocities</b></u><p> Not long ago, I was in a group of five students where each of us had to give a short presentation. One of the students decided to attach a quiz to the end of his, wherein the students would compete against the doctors to see who could answer more questions based on his presentation. In an act of astonishing foolishness, he made it into a wager; if the students lost, we had to make a potluck lunch for the doctors. Had I been playing on my own against the doctors, I would have actually won, simply because I was the only true anglophone and I had finished reading the question and picked the right answer before anyone else had even finished reading the stem. Sadly, I was not playing on my own, and after I got the first couple of questions the staff instituted a rule that no one could answer until the question had been read out loud in full, and to hell went our advantage. At the end of the questions, the students had actually tied with the doctors, at which point the classmate running it decided to do a tie-breaker round wherein, for erasons completly incomprehensible to me, people had to name the capitals of countries. Geography not being my strong suit and the attending staff having lived in every country on Earth in her life, the students were soundly thrashed, and lunch was scheduled for later that week. I remain quite bitter about this; I was happy to help make lunch because the doctors had already treated the students to a lunch and a movie, but it galls me that I was forced to do it because of a game and, to put it midly, a tactical error made by someone despite my very vocal protests at the time. Peter Woodward had it right about those dead worlds.<P> In any case, because the meal had to be vegetarian, I made a Boswith Salad. I preface its recipe with the story above because I believe that all recipes should come with a story, to make them more interesting in the event that they taste lousy. The Boswith Salad was a huge success, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't still have a story. Everything should come with a fun story.<P> Boswith Salad is a simple and pleasant recipe which can be either a main salad or a dessert salad. The idea behind it is a salad thematically inspired (quite loosely) by chess. The base of the salad is lettice, simply because this is cheap and plentiful. To the salad, we add blueberries and raspberries. These represent the two colours of the chessboard, black and red; blueberries are arguably blue as opposed to black, but I prefer them to blackberries and so prefer to use them with a moderate degree of poetic licence, but another person's salad could certainly use a truly black additive. I personally prefer using frozen berries rather than fresh, for several reasons. First, this was a salad I would be bringing to the hospital and leaving sitting for several hours, so using frozen berries meant that they didn't become warm and squishy in the hours before lunch. Second, if the frozen berries are left sitting in room-temperature air for a few hours (say, 4 or 5), they become semi-defrosted. When added to the salad, they retain just a touch of crunch and are also just a bit cooler than room air, making the salad cool and refreshing. Lastly, while the frozen blueberries remain more or less intact, the raspberries tend to collapse into a viscous mess as they defrost, making an instant spread which can be easily mixed with the whole salad. These ingredients alone make for a decent enough dish, but I like to add a fruit-based salad dressing; in this particular instance I used a raspberry vinaigrette, which not only enhanced the raspberry flavour but also added a touch more colour as well as a bit of extra oil, because everyone likes oil. Because I'm me, and because I'd never pulled this gag on the people for whom I was cooking, I fell back on my old standby of "make the food more interesting by putting one odd item into it." In the middle of the huge salad bowl, I hid one pretzel, telling people they could compete to see who finds it. I actually presented it as "I think I also mixed a pretzel into the salad... or possibly a tiple-A battery, I forget. Anyway, whoever finds it wins." You can bet that sort of thing will always catch people's attention.<P> The salad was a huge success. It wasn't the most popular dish of the meal, but it was second only to a bowl full of yummy miniature samosas, so I take that as acceptable. In any case, of all the dishes, my salad was the only one that got finished off during the meal proper, all other dishes getting picked off bit by bit as the day wore on and peckish residents wandered in and out of the conference room. Everyone said they enjoyed it, which I assume was true (and, as the poets tell us, therefore also beautiful). <P> For those wondering, the name "Boswith Salad" comes from an old essay I wrote which linked the invention of chess to the battle of Boswith field, August 22nd 1485, where Richard III really, really wanted a horse. I had the story all prepared to tell to go with the salad but sadly nobody walked into it and the story went untold. The important thing is just that it *had* a story, since at the time of the salad being served, I could hardly say that the story of the dish was the lost wager. Thus, we have not only a yummy dish, but also a dish with two stories that can be tied to it, should I ever find the need to prepare it again. I like stories, and I honestly think they make the food taste better. <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; //-->