Sad blogiversary
Tomorrow, April 11, Balls and Walnuts turns six. I’ve stuck with this longer than many of my blogging friends, for what that’s worth; that blog roll on the left is full of sites that haven’t been updated in over a year. I miss them. Jona was one of my first readers. Ishbadiddle was great at finding off-beat stories. Invisible Lizard (who writes great movie reviews) posts infrequently. On the upside, I had somehow convinced myself that Jim Donahue had closed up shop, but no, he’s posting regularly and he’s still on point with his sharp, quirky sense of humor. How the hell does he do it?
I keep wondering when I’ll get my mojo back. But as I’ve speculated in the past, I suspect my early drive, what kept this place hopping for years, was fueled by dissatisfaction with the life I’d built for myself and my family up north. I’m in a better place now (with regard to work — Bako is most definitely NOT a better place than the North Coast) and I can’t seem to generate enough angst to want to create.
No, that’s not quite right. I want to create, but the paint on my palette has all dried up.
The only silver lining: since I’m not writing, I have had a lot more time to read some great fiction.
D.
What leadership is all about
I’ll have more on our leadership conference, I promise. But for now, please enjoy two of the YouTube videos we watched today. (I thought about suggesting we all watch the baby scared by his mommy’s sneezes, but I had already made too much of a spectacle of myself.)
This one is a treat:
And this one, which our speaker claimed really happened (with the USS Enterprise):
enjoy!
D.
If I can fix it, anyone can
Far be it from me to call myself computer savvy, but I weathered a malware attack yesterday, resisted the urge to reinstall Windows XP, and managed to rid my computer of its nasty disease.
It all began during a search for Ipswich clams. These are the delicious little bastards that are damned near impossible to find on the west coast. One of the top links on a Google search is Digger’s Choice Seafood; the moment I clicked on the link, a Flash Player video kicked off, and even though I exed out pronto, the damage was done. Half of my desktop icons disappeared along with most of my C drive files, and I began getting error messages warning me of a “Critical Error, RAM memory usage is critically high, RAM memory failure,” and, “The system has detected a problem with one or more installed IDE / SATA hard disks.”
Odd thing was, I could still surf the net and even kinda sorta play games, except the computer kept booting me out of the games with every pop-up error message. The computer also claimed that McAfee had detected and eradicated a Trojan, and when I ran the McAfee scan, it didn’t find any threats. This was after updating McAfee, btw.
Which says something about McAfee, methinks.
The odd thing is, this particular malware is supposed to insist that I need to buy some software NOW NOW NOW! to eradicate the virus from my hard drive, and it’s all a scam to get my credit card information. But no such scam materialized. So I think McAfee must have partially disabled the malware, though not well enough to fix the system. Fortunately, I recalled that I had done good things in the past by searching for my error message word for word, and that’s what saved me this time.
I found my particular problem discussed and solved on bleepingcomputer.com, a site dedicated to just such issues (and they have a nice write-up on Wikipedia, so I figure they have to be legit). I had been infected with something called System Defragmenter. Bleeping Computer gave me step by step instructions that successfully kicked System Defragmenter’s ass in no time.
And soon enough I was back playing Dragon Age 2, in one night managing to bed my pirate wench and a possessed mage (who told me he loved me, isn’t that sweet?), and freeing my zombified mother from her mortal coil.
Don’t say I never done nothing for ya, Ma.
D.
The foreign body blog
It’s been over five years since I wrote a blog about foreign bodies. That’s remarkable enough (considering how fun* and interesting** and sometimes outright terrifying*** foreign bodies can be), but what I find really surprising is that no one has ever dedicated a blog to foreign bodies. Think of it: doctors around the world could submit photos and stories to the blog’s manager, who would after a year or two write a large format / coffee table book on foreign bodies, make oodles of money, then get his medical license revoked for violating patient confidentiality, and then lose oodles of money when he is sued by umpteen patients whose clinical photos showed up in the book (Damn you, I just know that was MY colonic can of Budweiser you included on page 135!), and then recoup all of his lost wealth and respectability when Quentin Tarantino directs a movie about his travails featuring Johnny Depp as the doctor-turned-coffee-table-book-author.
The pause that refreshes!
In med school, a well worn photocopy of an article from the Journal of Gastroenterology made the rounds among us budding surgeons. The article detailed a number of case histories of colonic foreign bodies, but the most memorable one concerned a gay couple who were celebrating the New York Yankees’ victory in the 1978 World Series by putting to good use a baseball signed by Catfish Hunter****. If I remember correctly, the non-incapacitated half of this couple was insistent that the baseball be removed unscathed. (Which brings to mind the apocryphal story of the ER patient with an electric vibrator located just past the reach of his fingers. The surgeon, so the story goes, asked him whether he wanted the vibrator removed, “or do you want me to change the batteries.”)
Most foreign body stories are not as much fun as these, particularly at my end of the body. It’s hard to laugh at a toddler’s misfortune, after all. And betting on the date of a swallowed penny has limited entertainment value.
Not many blogs on foreign body extraction, I’m afraid. Here’s one from rural Nepal, and here’s another from a blog oddly entitled, “Dr Ko Ko Gyi’s Blog /
Autobiography of Dr Abdul Rahman Zafrudin.” Dr. Gyi/Zafrudin has a number of disturbing images on that site, but here’s the money quote:
Rectal foreign bodies are typically inserted and the majority of cases are the result of erotic activity. Typically found objects are vibrators, dildoes, light bulbs, candles, shot glasses, and bottles. Patients may be very embarrassed to disclose the circumstances regarding the foreign body insertion and there may have been multiple attempts at removal. The image shown demonstrates a vibrator in the rectum along with a pair of salad tongs that became lodged after attempts at self-removal.
He also includes a nasal foreign body story from House, and it’s anyone’s guess why he included a fictional story amongst a number of true ones.
The author of the Sermo Blog solicited “most interesting foreign body” stories from a number of physicians. My favorite quote:
Response from a Urologist: “At our hospital recently the general surgeons removed from the stomach a bound and gagged barbie doll that the patient had swallowed.”
All this talk of rectal foreign bodies has made me hungry. Time to make dinner.
D.
* My favorite: beads. The trick is to hook the hole. Close runner-up: any nasal foreign body that can be extracted by tricking the patient into sneezing it out (I have my ways!)
** Most interesting: the piedrito, which I blogged back in 2005.
*** Most terrifying: half of a pigeon skull wedged between the vocal cords of a two-year-old. Terrifying because this easily could have turned into a lethal situation.
**** Details made up by yours truly. Except I’m pretty sure the cause of celebration was, indeed, the Yankees’ victory.
Towers
This afternoon, we had our second class in the You Too Can Be A Leader! Leadership Training Seminar. (Not the actual name, but it could be.) As best I can tell, the theme today had something to do with a triangle. How you need three things to be an effective leader. Damned if I can remember what they are, but I do remember the activity with which we ended the afternoon: in groups of five or six, we had to build a tower.
We were given a large sheet of paper, scissors, masking tape, three styrofoam cups, three styrofoam plates, a few 3×5 cards, three sticks, and a marking pen. For the first ten minutes we had to plan our approach but we could not touch the materials. Then we were given eight minutes to build the thing.
Turns out, surprise surprise, that this is a well known technique for teaching team leadership skills. Our instructor followed the description given in that link closely, down to the reshuffling of members midway through the planning process.
I should have taken charge of my group but I didn’t, mostly because I have a tendency to ham things up and I had already made a spectacle of myself this afternoon*. Instead, I volunteered the biggest guy in our group, on the basis of him being the biggest guy in our group. And he got caught up in a design concept which I thought was inferior to the one I thought of (tripod base topped by a cylindrical tower). But then, I thought, how difficult can this be? I figured his design (much narrower tripod base topped by a cylindrical tower) would do fine. And, since it conserved materials, it would be a taller tower than mine, thus garnering extra brownie points.
Well, ours toppled. Turns out paper really does have mass, who’d have thunk. The win condition was: five feet tall at a minimum and able to withstand our instructor blowing on it. Ours was six feet easy, but it crumpled with a stiff blow. By which we all learned that it never pays to be an overachiever, particularly when surrounded by blowhards.
The other interesting activity this afternoon went like this: the instructor flashed eight words at us for five seconds, and then we had to write down what we could remember. I got seven of the eight. The eight words were all related: something like tired, bed, dream, night, and so forth. The point of the exercise was that many people came up with the word “sleep” in their lists, even though “sleep” was not one of the original words.
I did not come up with “sleep.” In fact, when the instructor said, “Show of hands, how many remembered ‘sleep,'” I blurted out, “That WASN’T one of the original words!” And then he seemed to be saying that coming up with “sleep” was a good thing, like that meant you were some kind of big picture guy. Right. I happen to think that recalling seven of eight words when you’ve only been given five seconds to look is a pretty damn impressive bit of memory, though nothing so impressive as what contestants do in the World Memory Games.
No, I’m really not sure what that activity was all about.
Next up, no doubt: we have to fall backward and trust that the others will catch us.
D.
*I really must learn that the phrase “try not to be a total douche” is not polite in mixed company.
Some Gnarls
I like Who’s Gonna Save My Soul a bit better, but I already posted that one to Facebook. Nevertheless, this video brings together Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell for the first time since Blue Velvet*.
Take that, Forrest Gump.
Yeah, I’ve had a singular lack of anything to say lately. Tomorrow I’m having Installment Two of my leadership course, so that ought to be good for a blog. If I can keep my eyes open. Do you suppose I’d lose Leadership Brownie Points if I brought my ebook reader?
D.
*I don’t know this for a fact, but it sounds true.
Could have used more Yiddish, but still a hoot
This weekend, I played through Shivah, by indie producer Wadjet Eye Games:
If you're that close to the third rail, don't mess with Rabbi Stone.
You play Rabbi Russell Stone, a New York City rabbi whose congregation has nearly abandoned him due to his absurdly gloomy sermons, and whose temple is seriously short on cash. After one particularly dismal Friday night service, a cop arrives, announcing that a man murdered three days ago has left Stone’s synagogue over $10,000 inheritance money. Stone recognizes the name of murdered man, but he’s puzzled. Jack Lauder was the last person Stone expected would leave him money. Smelling a pig*, Stone decides to investigate.
It’s an old-style game (think Space Quest, but with even lower production values) happily lacking in pixel-hunting and inventory-recombination puzzles. Most of the work resides in figuring out the dialog tree, which amounts to realizing that the “rabbinical response” (answering a question with a question) is usually the best option. Smooth sailing for the most part until the end game, where it is fiendishly difficult not to end your days as either a bullet-ridden corpse or a big yarmulkeh-adorned splat on the New York streets far below.
If you like the idea of grumpy rabbi as hard-boiled hero, Shivah is the game for you. And for only $4.95? Such a bargain!
D.
*Admittedly, rats are unkosher too (try to find a rabbi who will bless a dead rat), but smelling a pig is far less trite.
Friday’s arcana
Tonight we had our graduation ceremony for the Hippocrates Circle group. These are about 30 bright young middle-schoolers who want to become doctors; as I think I mentioned, I made a spectacle of myself a couple weekends ago by scoping my own throat twice to give ’em a good show. (I tried to convince our urologist that he should volunteer for Hippocrates Circle next year. Now that would truly be memorable.)
In the little graduation pamphlet that listed the kids’ names, someone had written, “In this group are four future pediatricians, nine general surgeons, eight family practitioners, five orthopedic surgeons,” and so forth. Numbers guessed at by yours truly — I forgot to bring home one of the pamphlets. When I read this, I wanted to get up and talk to the assembled students, teachers, family members, nurses, and administrators, and tell them the secret of medical school: it’s the exceptional student who leaves med school the same as he entered. Future Ob-gyns become pathologists, pathologists become radiologists, radiologists become orthopedic surgeons, and so forth.
Psychiatrists become ENT docs. There’s just no telling.
No alcoholism runs in my family, but I think I could seriously get effed up over Irish whiskey. It goes down like a dream, even the relatively cheap stuff. I believe that folks who shell out big money for aged scotch and other fancy shmancy whiskeys simply have not yet tried Irish whiskey.
Thanks, Dean.
So it turns out there’s a name for the music I like: post-punk. The list includes Laurie Anderson, Devo, The Cure, Swans, Violent Femmes, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Talking Heads. And it’s a pretty damned long list, too, probably hundreds of hours I could spend snooping You Tube to find bands on this list that I like. (Why aren’t The B-52s on the list, though?)
Just at random, sort of, I listened to some Josef K (meh) and Lydia Lunch (better). I wish I could tell Pandora, “Just feed me post-punk, ‘kay?” But Pandora always wants to branch out and give me pop. Which, you know, is kinda antithetical to the whole post-punk feel, The Human League notwithstanding.
And can I just say that the more I listen to Joy Division, the better they sound? It’s a good thing I wasn’t into them back in college . . . Is there a better song about depression and suicide than New Dawn Fades? Brought tears to my eyes reading those lyrics, knowing something of what Ian Curtis went through. And I’m relatively well adjusted now.
Back to the list.
Someone could make a lot of money by creating a combination cat piss detector and deodorizer. The deodorizer part is easy: CarraScent would detoxify a car that had harbored a dead badger in the Mojave Desert. But what is it that makes cat piss so noxious, and could anyone build a detector for it?
Quick google provides numerous answers, but the leading contenders are ammonia and musk. Since you don’t have to find every component of cat urine, just one part, why not go after the ammonia? And there are indeed ammonia detectors commercially available. And oh, goody, the cheapest one I could find is a hair over $300.
Still, it would beat having to get down on one’s knees to sniff the furniture.
Yeah I know y’all aren’t gamers, not many of you, but I want you to know that Dragon Age 2 rawks. I dig that my badass male warrior can romance damn near everyone regardless of sex or species and grin his way through all of it. The only negative feedback from my group came when I flirted with a male elf prostitute: my in-game sister took issue.
Which brings me to the game’s one flaw. It won’t let me romance my in-game sister, Bethany.
She has one hell of a grip on that staff.
D.
Right
I wanted to post Gnarls Barkley’s Who’s Gonna Save My Soul, but it has embedding disabled. This one’s pretty damn good, though:
Intense.
D.