Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Asking for trouble. Begging for it.
I’ve invited my partner and his wife over for dinner tomorrow night. We’re leaving for vacation on Monday, and I want to show them how to feed the frogs.
But I’m on call.
And I have a patient in the hospital with a treacherous airway.
The gods are going to smite me, I just know it.
D.
You can find anything on the Internet
Karen’s watching a National Geographic program on heroin. She asked, “I wonder if it’s possible to purify street heroin.” We’re both former chemists, so we knew that it had to be possible to recrystallize purified heroin from a dirty solution. And we were right.
The link is to Erowid. Here’s Erowid’s mission statement:
Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.
Is that cool or what? I’ve crossed paths with Erowid before, and it sure looks like a fun site to browse, oh, I don’t know, next time you’re wondering whether you can get high smoking banana peels.
Not surprisingly, the instructions for purifying street heroin utilizes reagents that are easy to come by: hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid, which is available at pool supply stores), household ammonia, ethyl ether (the trickiest reagent — the author claims that some diesel starters are ethyl ether) and baking soda. It’s the sort of purification we did a dozen times or more in Organic Chemistry Lab.
Isn’t the Internet a remarkable thing? We take it for granted, but think about it: nearly everything is out there. Knowledge has become democratized to a degree; you still need the education and access to a computer.
When I was a kid, we had to walk up to the TV to change channels (and programs were black-and-white). People spent hundreds of dollars buying multi-volume encyclopedias for their kids. Bookstores like Vroman’s could order books for you if they didn’t have them on the shelves, but you had to count on the completeness of the local library’s card catalog to tell you what was out there.
In the 1960s, this heroin question might have been answerable by organic chemists and, perhaps, educated users who had received the knowledge by oral tradition. And now it’s just a click away.
D.
Inception
Jake and I saw Inception today, and while I liked the movie, it’s one of the trailers that really blew my mind.
They’ve made a movie about the creation of Facebook. No kidding. It’s called The Social Network and the trailer was about as thrilling as the title. While I enjoyed Jessie Eisenberg in Zombieland, I’m not following him to this execrable commercial-as-drama. What’ll be next, You’ve Got Gmail? Unless the Harvard students in this film develop a hunger for human brains, I’ll sit this one out.
But back to Inception. I almost didn’t see it because I happen to dislike Leonardo DiCaprio, or as he’s known in this household, Leonardo DiCrapio. He’s one of those actors (like Tom Cruise) who, for me anyway, always seems like he’s playing a role rather than living the character. Karen sat this one out because she’s even less forgiving than me — she thought his portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator was lifeless.
Having seen the movie, I have one thing to say. Or rather, one thing to photoshop.
Just a few comments for now, since it’s late and I still need to play Civilization IV and kick some Incan ass. (Hey, they started it!) But first, if you haven’t read a review, here’s the movie in a nutshell: DiCaprio’s character (Cobb) and his band of technicians/psychologists/artists (they’re a bit of all three) can delve into a dreamer’s mind to extract secrets. They’re industrial espionage operatives, and they’ve been given a new job: to plant an idea, which in their parlance is known as inception. Cobb would rather not take this one on, since inception is either difficult or impossible (and, we come to learn, dicey emotional turf for him), but his employer, Saito, makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Pull this one off and Saito will fix some pending charges back home that prevent Cobb from returning to his family.
Hey, um . . . now, why couldn’t his family rejoin him in some extradition-less foreign country? Forget it, forget it. Suspend disbelief.
Some thoughts . . .
1. The movie has an interesting narrative structure. Not as ingenious as director Christopher Nolan’s earlier Memento, but still challenging. At one point in the movie, the dreams are nested four deep, so there are five layers of reality (one real one, four dream), and Nolan still manages to tell a clear story.
2. Which is not to say that the plot doesn’t have problems. Jake and I being Hoffmans, we promptly tore it apart not five minutes out of the theater.
Which is not to say that we didn’t still enjoy it.
3. Nolan wrote the screenplay, too, and he made superb use of a literary device known as resonance — repetition of a word or image (in Inception‘s case, some of both) to achieve depth and emotional punch. Marvelous work.
4. This movie is a smorgasbord of former child actors. Lukas Haas (remember the kid in Witness?) is here, as is Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“Third Rock from the Sun”). Ellen Page was in two TV shows as a kid: something called “Pit Pony” and another something called “Trailer Park Boys.” And Leonardo DiCaprio made his bones as a teenager in “Santa Barbara,” “Roseanne,” and “Parenthood.”
5. The science is bankrupt, inasmuch as Nolan perpetuates an old myth that time passes more slowly in dreams than it does in the real world. Did I say that right? In other words, five minutes in a dream equals one hour in the real world, something like that, and the deeper nested you are in dreams, the more the time dilation is magnified. Not a minor plot point — crucial, in fact.
A renowned sleep and dream researcher named William Dement determined something like 40 years ago that time passes at the same rate in dreams as it does in the real world. He did this by waking subjects up at a specified time following the onset of REM sleep and asking them to recount what they had experienced. Repeatedly, five minutes of dream time contained about five minutes worth of stuff, ten minutes encompassed ten minutes, and so forth.
But don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the movie.
5. One thing I really, really liked: you know how in caper movies (think Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example), the premise and the characters are set up in the beginning with an action-packed caper holding plenty of near-disasters, but the final result is oh so slick? Well in Inception, the initial caper goes to hell and then gets worse. So refreshing. Also refreshing: it’s a movie about dreams, and yet Nolan avoided scenes with gratuitous sex and nudity.
That’s it for now . . . what did you think?
D.
Live anywhere & do well
We lost one of our ophthalmologists today — she’s heading up to the Bay Area to join a private practice. As I left her going away party, I told her that she’ll need to install a dry sauna into her home. She gave me a confused smile, so I added, “To remember us by. But you’ll also have to throw in some cow manure.”
That about sums up my son’s impression of Bako. It’s hot and half the time it smells of cow manure (or, for the sake of variety, garbage). He’s decided he wants to settle eventually in a place more like southwestern Oregon, where he grew up.
“Jake,” I told him, “the sad fact is, you’ll go where the jobs are.” And it is a sad fact. The climate here is miserable, the opposite end of the spectrum from the Pacific Northwest, but I’m happier here because the job is better. Not that I disliked my patients up north — they weren’t the problem. But down here I’m a part of something bigger than myself and it feels good.
And if climate change would bring the Pacific Ocean to our city limits, and also give us an average summer’s day of 70F, I’d really be happy, but I fear climate change ain’t heading in that direction.
I told Jake that the key, the Holy Grail, would be a live-anywhere job that (A) he enjoys, (B) makes him a good living, and (C) cannot be outsourced. The only things that came to mind were “screen doctor” and “bestselling novelist,” but those are things I might enjoy. Jake dislikes writing (though he is good at it). Consultancy jobs satisfy all but (C), unless Jake were to super-specialize in just the right niche topic.
As much as I hate to admit it, medicine satisfies a lot of these requirements (unless you want to live in an in-demand area like San Diego, the Bay Area, or Seattle — but even then the jobs are there, provided you’re willing to make some compromises). I doubt Jake would want to go into medicine, but I must observe that the same thing that attracted me to medicine is still true: he would never be out of work.
It’s a harsh, unpredictable world out there. Just as for my patients I wish I had a crystal ball, I wish I had one for my son, too.
D.
Creatures of meme
How many can you recognize?
Too tired to blog right now. I come home, cook dinner, go to the gym, come home again, crash.
D.
Sundry and various?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how our educational system sets children up for a lifetime of disappointment. Think about it: for 12 years, 16 if you go to college and don’t take summer school, you work something like 37 weeks out of the year and vacation for the remaining 15. Then you join the work force and you’re stuck with two measly weeks of vacation a year. Four if you’re really lucky.
And now they’re talking about boosting the retirement age to 70, and of course one “benefit” of the current recession is that those of us with jobs are, of course, very grateful for that fact, and not too inclined to question the status quo that has us working like oxen.
I like to imagine a world where we didn’t have to spend half our budget on defense and where corporations paid their fair share of taxes. In that world, I suspect we could all work four-day weeks and have at least four weeks’ vacation per year. Sigh.
I think I’ve finally perfected pad thai. So often, my pad thai comes out soggy or soupy. This time, I decided to prepare things in four separate batches, which I would bring together in the end.
First, I made a salad of bean sprouts, green onion, cilantro, and radicchio (red cabbage is more traditional). I tossed it with a little sriracha sauce (that sweet – garlicky – red pepper sauce you find sometimes in Thai restaurants). Second: I sliced up part of a cucumber and also a carrot. Third: I sauteed shrimp, mushrooms, and the white parts of green onions, along with some garlic, tofu, and pad thai sauce. Once that was cooked, I put it in the oven to keep it warm. Finally, I made some wide rice noodles and then sauteed them in the same wok along with extra pad thai sauce. And then I put it all together.
Yes, kind of a production, but I think it worked out well. The noodles had the right chewiness and weren’t overly soggy, which is what usually happens when I make pad thai. Plus I was able to keep the flavors distinctive. Jake only liked the noodles and the tofu, but Karen and I thought it was all decent.
Tonight, Keith Olbermann railed against the Obama Administration’s spinelessness in light of the recent Shirley Sherrod brouhaha. In his Special Comment, he made reference to a bit of French history I’d heard of but never bothered to learn about: the Dreyfus Affair. Go to that link, read the Wiki, and explain to me why no one has ever made an English language movie about this bit of history.
It has everything: Treachery! Prejudice! Spineless bureaucrats! Noble, heroic authors! Devil’s Island! And ultimate exoneration!
No sex, not that I could see, but any competent screenwriter could fix that omission in a heartbeat.
D.
One of my favorite Tick moments
Watch at least the first 1 min 30 sec. Some of the best TV. Ever.
D.