Balls and Walnuts
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Life, meet Art. Art, Life.
Live blogging tonight!
Jake and I have been sharing yucks and generally having fun with the Sam and Max games. These retro mysteries are all about the wisecracks; the puzzles are usually trivial.
In the first game, Culture Shock, Sam and Max contend with a trio of former child stars who are roaming our protagonists’ neighborhood, promoting the mesmerizing video of cult-leader-wannabe Brady Culture. The video promises to teach viewers “Eye-Bo fitness,” eye exercises guaranteed to get you the girl/boy/job/foot massage of your dreams.
As if anyone would believe eye exercises could improve your life. Crazy, huh?
Meanwhile, purely in the interests of research (natch!), this afternoon I googled “psychology adults abused as children.” This search led me to this Amazon page for EMDR in the Treatment of Adults Abused as Children.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — Eye-Bo by any other name. What’s the big idea? One reviewer writes,
EMDR helps you to integrate the two halves of your brain and to heal from trauma that is trapped in your nervous system. EMDR is a very effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It isn’t quite as spectacular as the books make it seem, but it really can work.
Hmm. How does that work, again?
EMDR helps you to recognize that the abuse happened in the past, and is not happening in the present. Therefore it is easier for you to process your traumatic experiences because you don’t have to live as if the abuse is still happening.
I see. It’s that old right-brain/left-brain thingamobob. But are there any peer reviewed reports to support EMDR? After all, these are vulnerable patients who come to their therapist following a childhood of victimization. No one would take advantage of such folks by taking their money in exchange for unproven methods . . . would they?
As usual, Quackwatch has the dope:
Only one published study has directly compared EMDR with a no-treatment control group. Jensen (1994) randomly assigned Vietnam veterans with PTSD to either an EMDR group or a control group that was promised delayed treatment. EMDR produced lower within-session SUDs [Subjective Units of Distress] ratings compared with the control condition, but did not differ from the control session in its effect on PTSD symptoms. In fact, the level of interviewer-rated PTSD symptoms increased in the EMDR group following treatment.
The author concludes,
The proponents of EMDR have yet to demonstrate that EMDR represents a new advance in the treatment of anxiety disorders, or that the eye movements purportedly critical to this technique constitute anything more than pseudoscientific window dressing . . . .
Because of the limited number of controlled studies on EMDR, both practitioners and scientists should remain open to the possibility of its effectiveness. Nevertheless, the standard of proof required to use a new procedure clinically should be considerably higher than the standard of proof required to conduct research on its efficacy. This is particularly true in the case of such conditions as PTSD, for which existing treatments have already been shown to be effective. The continued widespread use of EMDR for therapeutic purposes in the absence of adequate evidence can be seen as only another example of the human mind’s willingness to sacrifice critical thinking for wishful thinking.
And now I get to kick back and watch. Will any EMDR fanatics come out of the woodwork to tear me a new one? Folks are always rarin’ to testify, it seems.
D.
Cherry blossoms: three views
The Japanese lurve their cherry trees, not so much for the fruit as for the blossoms. Perhaps, as this site suggests, the “cherry blossom front” marching across Japan captures the national interest because it symbolizes the coming of Spring. But this is too simplistic. Cherry blossoms had symbolic mojo for the samurai:
The cherry blossom was considered an especially beautiful and important symbol for Japanese samurai because at the height of its beauty it would inevitably fall to the ground to die. Samurai also had to be willing to sacrifice themselves in their prime, and the cherry blossom was evidence that this is the natural way of things and could even be beautiful and pure.
. . . and cherry blossoms have a Zen symbolic value as well. This site quotes from Robert Aitken’s A Zen Wave:
Here’s what Aitken tells us about the importance of the cherry blossoms to Japanese life.
[page 131] Instilled in the Japanese mind is the association of the ephemerality of the cherry blossoms with the brevity of human life. Blooming for so short a time, and then casting loose in a shower of lovely petals in the early April wind, cherry blossoms symbolize an attitude of nonattachment much admired in Japanese culture.
Compare this attitude with the Western attitude of the pretty cherry blossoms presaging the appearance of the real purpose of the cherry tree: cherries.
Below the cut: three views of the cherry blossoms in my front yard.
My life in candy
Oh. My. God. Now they’re making chocolate-covered PayDay bars.
It’s like a Baby Ruth, only better. Baby Ruths are too chewy, too provocative to my TMJs. Chocolate-covered PayDay bars melt in my mouth, giving me that quick double-charge of sucrose and theobromine. Aaah.
Candy wasn’t always this good.
The Interniche
You know one of the neatest thing about Teh Intertubes? That wonderful glow I feel when I discover a place born of obsession, an idea developed from infant twinkle to dazzling star.
A place like Jump the Shark.
What’s Jump the Shark? It’s a site dedicated to a specific moment in the life of a television show: the point at which a program left its peak behind and began its stomach-wrenching downward plunge.
The name derives from an episode of Happy Days: Fonzie, water-skiing in the Pacific, literally jumped a shark. This (according to site founder Jon Hein) was the beginning of the end.
Jump the Shark spotlights a host of common themes. There are only so many ways you can jump the shark, apparently: a different actor steps in to play the same character (think Darren on Bewitched), the cute little kids on the show hit puberty (Leave it to Beaver, anyone?), a winsome li’l child gets introduced (Scrappy Doo!), a Movie is made, and so forth. Jump the Shark also claims that some programs never jumped the shark: X-Files, The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and one or two others. I beg to differ on MASH, but a site like this lives and dies on public opinion, and I’m only one vote.
And that’s the other cool thing about Jumping the Shark: public input. You can vote on these questions all night long and you’ll barely scratch the site’s surface.
A whole website devoted to the beginning of the end. I’m so impressed with this, I’m giving this post its own new category: Interniches, websites that fill remarkably narrow niches.
Any other candidate Interniches?
D.
Remedial Social Skills, 101
I had to share this with you. In the “President’s Message” of our local medical society’s Bulletin, our prezzy bemoans the way we’ve grown apart as a community. We couldn’t even pick each other out of a police lineup! That is bad.
After urging our society’s members to become more cohesive, the President concludes with suggestions for change, ending with this groaner:
. . . write a biographical sketch about yourself or a colleague and send it to the Medical Society. There are great stories out there about who we are and how we got here. If we receive your work with permission to publish, it could show up in the Bulletin soon.
But that’s not the good bit. Here’s the good bit:
At the least, it will come in handy when it is time to write the obituary!
That’s not even the last sentence . . .
And on some days, that need seems to be sooner than we might have thought.
Shorter version: “Dudes. It’s getting harder and harder to research your obits, so if you want something more detailed than ‘Dr. Hoffman was an otolaryngologist who served our community for X years,’ write your own damned obituary. You’ll be dead sooner than you think.”
And people think I’m exaggerating when I say us docs have the social skills of bonsai trees.
D.
Way too much information
Kris sent this to me. Since I’m supposed to send it on to a few other friends, it certainly qualifies as a meme (technically, it’s a chain email). But why send it to a few people when I can blast all of you with it?
Renee preempts everyone else. Sorry, folks, but if you post sex toy pics in vivo, that deserves recognition!
Lyvvie the technical first digs BLTs, Men’s Health, and urine-soaked children
SxKitten lurves the pretty-colored stones, too
Dean likes his ice cream chocolatey
Like Dean, microsaur hates the Stupids
Pat’s not playing, but he is such a rocker
If you want to play, cut and paste it to your own blog, then change all the answers.
Now, here’s the interesting question, in my opinion. This Q&A is supposed to help you learn more about me. But since you already know everything there is to know about me, is it possible for you to know me better afterwards? *scratches head*
Here we go.
In Dreams
Read on for the Question of the Day.
With apologies to Roy Orbison.
A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
Go to sleep. everything is all right.
. . . and then that bastard fills me with images you wouldn’t show a seasoned war vet. What have I ever done to the sandman to deserve this?
Admittedly, last night didn’t rise to the usual levels of repulsiveness. The sandman’s mood ranged from annoying to irksome, rather than sadistic. I had one of those running dreams: I’m on the lam from someone, trying my damnedest to make it across country without detection, and I manage to elude capture after capture.
Usually I like these dreams because I always find some clever trick to get away, or I out-maneuver the baddies through sheer physical prowess. Those are good dreams even if I do wake up feeling exhausted. But last night, my usual writer must have been on a Thunderbird binge, and his stand-in was a fugitive scribbler from Will and Grace*.
Imagine: I’m in a hotel room. The baddies are at the door. How do I get away? By sliding the deadbolt on them! Then I grab a sweater so that I can change my clothes while on the run — yes, that would be my disguise: a new sweater.
Scene change. I’ve been caught by a huge, naked, black man who has me pinned to the ground by kneeling on me with his powerful legs. Cheap Freudian symbolism aside, the annoying part was (once again) how I got away. I rolled to one side, pushed a desk between us, and hollered, “See ya! Wouldn’t wanna be ya!” before exiting stage right. Lame!
It went on and on like that. Those bozos never did catch me, but only because their collective IQs wouldn’t have warmed a room. I woke up feeling cheated.
But that’s not the worst of it. There was, for example, the time about a week or two ago when I spent close to an hour in a doctor’s waiting room, bored silly. It really, truly felt like an hour. My mother was seeing her dermatologist and I was along for the ride.
Eventually, I was the only person left in the waiting room, and I became suspicious. I checked the parking lot, and my parents’ car was gone!
I had my Blackberry and my wallet, but no cash, so I had to walk home. This, too, seemed to take the better part of an hour. Then my parents passed me in their car and waved at me. When I finally caught up with them, my hands shook so much with anger that I couldn’t tie my shoes.
One loooong dream and all I can manage to do is sit on my butt reading magazines in a dermatologist’s waiting room. I couldn’t manage to dream about, say, a nasty tryst with a beautiful and dangerous Russian gal. Oh, no.
When the sandman gives me amorous dreams, he becomes unspeakably cruel. Last week, I found myself in a threesome with one of the seediest couples in Del Norte County. On the upside, their hygeine wasn’t nearly as bad as it is in real life. On the downside, when I washed my mouth out afterwards (in the dream!) a bunch of cole slaw came out.
I told my employee, Catrina, all about it. She agreed with me: My subconscious hates me.
***
*Question of the Day
Was Will and Grace the worst sitcom of all time? Lots of people seem to think so, which is why I picked it for that line above. I was tempted to use Seinfeld (in my opinion, one of the most overrated sitcoms of all time, after MASH — or AfterMASH, for that matter), but I suspect I would have been misunderstood. Or perhaps all you rabid Seinfeld lovers would have dragged me through the eStreets of Blogland.
This is a tough one. I keep remembering the great sitcoms; apparently, the dogs have slipped through my memory cracks. But I think I’ll have to go with Three’s Company, because that idiotic show only had one plot, and each character was the object of only a single running joke.
Question: what do you think is the worst sitcom of all time, and why?
Or, feel free to tell me how your subconscious hates you, too.
D.
You know you’re in trouble when . . .
you’ve blogged all your recipes.
Tonight, I made Chicken Kiev, focaccia, steamed broccoli, and creme brulee. I have no idea what to blog about, since my usual recourse (when stumped) is to post a recipe.
Unless . . .
Steamed Broccoli
Rinse broccoli and trim off the big fat stalk. Trim it down to individual florettes. Place in the top of your steamer.
Put steamer over boiling water, cover, and steam for five minutes.
Place thin slices of butter over the broccoli, add salt and pepper, toss, and serve.
***
How lame is that?
I’ll make it up to you. I’m going live, so if you’re around in the next hour or two, come ’round and say hi. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have more for you than goose eggs.
D.
You, too, can be an art critic
Art Crit is an interesting concept blog:
Art Crit was created as a forum for artists to share their work and get some feedback on it from other artists as well as the casual passerby. Most artists have spent considerable time gazing, interpreting, being with art and have a lot of valuable feedback to give one another. Thus, their thoughts are welcome and appreciated. There is also a great value in the thoughts of those who haven’t inhabited the typical constructs of artists, perhaps these folks can think outside the box and share their ideas. In any event, everyone is encouraged to participate at Art Crit. Let us know your reaction to a given piece, what comes to mind, there’s no right way to share your thoughts.
My friend Kenney Mencher has posted a painting to Art Crit and he wants feedback. Go, look, comment. And while you’re at it, check out some of Art Crit’s other posts, too.
Here’s something else: Kenney has a VERY different take on blogging.
D.