Paranormal prophylaxis

As you may have gathered from my previous post, ghosts scare me silly.  When I was a kid, my Older Brother had a book in his room called Monsters, Ghosts and UFOs.  I used to sneak into his room, take the book from his cupboard, read it, then put it back again without him suspecting, because if he caught me in his room he would do something unpleasant to me like The Typewriter or The Tickle Torture or perhaps simply punch me in the arm if he was feeling uninspired.

The UFO section was awesome, but it wasn't scary, so I didn't dwell on it.  The monster section was also awesome, but only had a few scary things in it, such as the picture of the werewolf with the blood dripping from his claws and mouth.  The rest of the monsters were mythical beasts and so forth which weren't scary.  The ghost section, however, was terrifying.

Among the highlights were: the photograph of the church altar which when developed showed a nine-foot-tall cowled monk that couldn't be seen with the naked eye, the disembodied hand that strangled the poor girl in the hall in the dark, the stones in New Guinea which suck out your soul if your shadow falls upon them and the poltergeist stories where furniture moved around and stones were flung at the house.

Because of these stories, I developed an unhealthy sense of paranoia about the supernatural.  As a way of protecting myself I came up with defensive measures which I used in common threatening scenarios.  They were very successful, as proved by the fact that I am here talking to you today.  If you are scared of ghosts, try these out:

1. Never make eye contact with yourself in a mirror.  If you do, and then eye contact is broken by the reflection, you'll be in some serious doo-doo.
2. In fact, try to avoid mirrors in general.  They create two problems.  First, what if you see someone in the mirror but when you turn around they aren't there?  Second, what if you don't see someone in the mirror but when you turn around there they are?  Big problem.
3. Never reach your hand into a dark room and grope around for a light-switch.   Someone will grab your arm for sure.
4. Don't stand too close the edge of a bed.  Someone will reach out from underneath and grab your ankle.
5. Don't look out windows in the dark.  You may see some glowing eyes, plus there is the whole reflection problem again.  Plus, never look out of a second story window in the dark.  There may be a wizened old man hovering  outside in mid-air staring back at you.  And his eyes might glow too.
   
6. Never appear frightened.  Once you look frightened, it's open season and you're the prey.  You should appear completely nonchalant for as long as you can.  Once your nerve breaks you need to run as fast as you possibly can.  Don't look back.
   
7. Always open the toilet door before flushing the toilet.  When they hear the toilet flush they'll know where you are so you'll need to run like hell.
8. Always cover your face completely when you sleep.  If you start to overheat it is acceptable to make a small tunnel to breath through but you should never look out this tunnel in case something is looking back at you.  Similarly, never let any of your limbs casually dangle from beneath the bedclothes.
9. Doors should be kept closed so they can't eerily swing open "in the breeze".
   
10. When passing through doors, they should be flung violently open so you can tell if anything is behind them, including malicious and unsympathetic siblings.
11. If you have to get up in the night to go to the loo, it's best to keep your eyes half shut.  Not only will this make it less likely that you'll see the ghostly floating ladies in the hall, it also means that your eyes will adjust faster when you turn off the toilet light when you're done so you'll avoid running headlong into a wall and stunning yourself.
12. If possible, always be accompanied by an animal.  Cats will hiss at empty chairs that ghosts are sitting in. Dogs will bark at doors that ghosts are hiding behind.  Then they'll run away and leave you in the lurch, but at least you've been warned.  (Fish and birds are not so useful but if you're desperate...) 
13. Finally, never accept a challenge to spend the night locked in the haunted room at the top of the belfry in the old MacGillicuddy place in the middle of the woods.  This one never came up actually, but it's best to be prepared.

Any tips from readers on how to avoid dire supernatural horrors?

Since I won't be sleeping for the next month I guess now is a good time to start studying

It's a dark and stormy night.  My Smaller Half was away for the evening.  An email arrived.  Ding!  Better read it.  Oh look, the medical student's society is hosting a free movie night to preview this exciting new film.  How wonderful.  Look, there's a link to the trailer.  Click! 

Oh.  OH!  It's a horror movie.  The worst sort of horror movie.  I can deal with people being chopped up by crazed red-headed stepchildren puppet zombies.  I can't deal with ghost films.  At all.  After I saw Sixth Sense I had to walk around my house with my back to the wall to make sure they weren't sneaking up behind me.  This movie looks really scary.

So I end up having the following email exchange with the sadistic official from the student club who sent out the notification and is clearly trying to ruin my life.

PTR

Jesus - I watched that trailer and it scared the shit out of me.  There's no way I'm watching the whole thing without a critical care unit and a psych referral.

Sadistic Official

Just thought I'd offer something different - a chilled evening for you and your loved ones away from study.

P.S. I was too freaked to watch the trailer.

If you too would like to incur years of expensive therapy, watch the trailer at this site:
The Hippety-Hoppity Bunny Goes To Morning Tea (trailer)

Catheters

Had a prac today on how to place a urinary catheter.  For those unfamiliar with such devices, it's basically a tube which is inserted into the urethra and up to the bladder to help empty the bladder if the person can't empty it reliably themselves or if urinary output needs to be carefully monitored, for example if urine futures are booming on Wall St.

It seems heaps easier than I had envisaged, which no doubt means that it will be the bane of my life when I am an intern and can't get it right.  Of course, we were practising on models, and I don't mean clothes-horses.  I mean plastic and rubber simulacra of people's urinary bits.  In a way that actually made it harder since the models were fairly rigid and unyielding, whereas apparently real people are soft to the touch and altogether more squishy.

It's a strange experience, poking a rubber tube up someone's wazoo and feeding in more and more.  Especially on men.  Men have really long urethras.  I was starting to worry that I was going to run out of catheter, but I got there in the end.  I was also concerned when the urine did not start to flow, but apparently siphoning by mouth is right out.  They have little syringes for that.

The (disturbingly young looking) RMO who was instructing me in the fine art of catheter placement on the male station (I had already perfected the art of placing a catheter in females) almost made me laugh out loud.  I was waiting to take my turn so I got to watch the guy before me do it and figure out some dos and don'ts.  The RMO looked at me and said, "You're going to smash this aren't you?"  I'm pretty sure that he was being encouraging, but all I could think of was the idea of smashing the catheter in, which is not a good mental image at all.

Back in old days I suppose med students learned this stuff either by practising on each other, or by being unleashed on a ward full of demented old people.  Either way, I'm glad that we've moved on.

77%

So once more Australia is the laughing stock of the world.  To be more specific, I'm referring to the already infamous blackface sketch imitating the Jackson 5 on the Hey Hey It's Saturday reunion.

Lots has been written about it, which I won't reprise here.  However, here are my observations:

1. Good on Harry Connick Jr for stating his objections up front.  That's hard to do and I admire someone who stands up for what they believe in.
2. Even if HCJr did once imitate a black preacher (and I haven't seen it), that has no bearing on whether the HHIS sketch was racist. 
3. Even if HCJr did once imitate a black preacher (and I haven't seen it), that was then - this is now.  Perhaps that was why he felt compelled to speak out - who knows?  There's a big difference between hypocrisy and someone changing their mind or opinions as time passes.  And even hypocrits are right 50% of the time.
   
4. I think the sketch was racist.  However, it was the best sort of racism - the sort that is loud and public and initiates debate.  Silent racism is much worse - the type that gets emailed around as jokes or revealed only in selected company where people won't "take it the wrong way".  No one learns anything from that.
   
5. "It really wasn't intended to be anything to do with racism at all" is not an apology - it's an excuse.  Try taking responsibility for something you twits.
   

Here's an experiment for you to try: go to http://google.com and type in these words:

why are Australians so

and see what suggestions google has for what you're going to type in next. 

Think about it.  (Think think about it)

Peace

So Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize in the category of Peace.  That's pretty strange.  Much as I admire his achievements and find him personally likeable too, what has he actually done to deserve it?  Simply being 300% smarter than the previous guy in his job doesn't really cut the mustard as far as I'm concerned.  Effectively, he's been given the Nobel simply for doing his job competently.

Have we forgotten that he's the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force ever to exist on this planet?  Maybe if he sent them all home to retrain as masseurs I think a Peace gong would be in order.  But "business as usual" isn't really the kind of citation that most of us were expecting of a Nobel laureate.

So who should have won?  According to one of my (as usual) anonymous commenters, me.  (Link.)

Sushi Golf - healing the world since 2009.

"Portfolio"

The latest great injustice to be levied on me is that I (oh, and the other 3 trillion people in my year at uni) had to write a "portfolio" to submit to my school-allocated mentor, who will then read it, shake his head, then have a chat to me about it while trying to hide his amusement and/or disgust, and then we'll throw the whole thing in the bin until next year when we'll do it all over again.  Apparently it's for my own good.

The first thing that annoyed me about it was (as you have probably already guessed) that it's called a "portfolio".  To me, a portfolio is a collection of artistic works, like etchings or bad monologues (like this blog).  At a stretch you might call what I banged out tonight for uni artistic, but I don't think a single object can ever constitute a collection.  I suppose that if the object is truly unique it might just qualify, like, "Hey Jeff, have you seen my collection of the Holy Grail?  It's sweet as!" - but my portfolio is probably not a case of that calibre.

The second thing that annoyed me was that we had to write a thousand words.  There seemed to be a lot of grief around uni about that being a lot, but to me a thousand words is not much.  As you may gather from this blog I can spew this stuff out day after day with very little effort or frontal lobe activity whatsoever.  So tonight I got to 900 words before I'd even started to rant and rave properly.  It was quite hard to focus and not put lots of stupid jokes into my portfolio.

The one good thing about it was that I was able to rant and rave a bit.  Hard as it may be to believe, I do actually self-censor a fair bit in this blog.  I do try really hard not to write awful things about other people here because a) they might read it one day and hunt me down, and b) I am a child of a universe no less than the trees and stars, and it's bad karma to hang shit on people all the time.

The "portfolio", however, was a golden opportunity to unleash some of my pent-up hatred for various things that drive me wild from time to time.  Actually, it's really not that bad.  It's just that sometimes I get a little piqued by things because I am highly strung, like all artistes.  It was nice to be quite specific and precise about such moments and to then to mail it off to a complete stranger who is obligated to read it.  Maybe I should get a psychiatrist.  Or at least a biographer.

Dreams of greatness

Throughout history, great men of the arts and sciences have been inspired by their dreams.

Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz dreamed of a snake biting its own tail and upon waking conceived of the structure of the benzene ring.  Robert Louis Stevenson imagined The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a fevered dream.  Paul McCartney woke early in the morning with the melody for Yesterday fully formed in his head.  The Hindu goddess Namagiri would appear in the dreams of Srinivasa Ramanujan and reveal mathematical theorems to him by writing them in blood (yet never appeared as his co-author).

Last night I shared in this bounty.

I dreamed of a golf course where the players used sushi and lightly fried seafood instead of golf balls.  Wandering the course and interacting with the players were people dressed as members of the late French aristocracy.  For example, at the first hole you had to carefully chip some tuna from the floor up onto a plate on a table, where Marie Antoinette would delicately eat it.

I think this kind of thing has a lot of potential.  Who's interested?

A la recherche du feet perdu

This evening I was exhausted.  We had some seriously dull lectures today at uni.  I appreciate the time and effort that the busy doctors put in to prepare these classes... no wait, I don't, because they are incredibly dull.  One guy made me really angry because he kept peppering us with questions and then complaining when no-one answered them.  But his questions were either incomprehensible or totally ambiguous.  It was impossible to answer them!  Meanwhile he was swinging this big old stick around like a 19th century schoolmistress.  I didn't want to get involved so I shut down my cortex and couldn't wake it up again.

Anyway, that was completely tangential.  I was exhausted.  I knew that if I went to the gym I would feel better but I really just wanted to lie down and sleep.  Fortunately, years earlier I had had the great foresight to marry my Smaller Half who, amongst her many virtues (but by no means chiefly), is adept at getting me off my lazy arse and off to the gym.

I whined and moaned on the way there in order to secure a firm 30-minute cap on our attendence.  That went right out the window immediately on our arrival when the instructor from the punchy-kicky class came downstairs and started press-ganging people into doing it since only one person had volunteered. 

I actually haven't done the class since I wrote about it in July so I didn't have my Pirate Ninja costume on hand, which was tragic.  What was on hand was the stench from those gloves.  Both hands.  About 10 minutes in, when I and they were all warmed up, I started to notice the pong.  At first I thought it was the other guy in the class, but then I realized it was coming from my gloves.

Back in the old days when I was a penniless student in Brisbane with poor personal hygiene and a liking for vigorous exercise, I used to remove my shoes in my maths lectures as a practical joke.  My feet smelled so bad that my friends would hold their breath and give me dead-arms to force me to put my shoes back on.  Ever since I realized that it wasn't exactly a chick-puller to have feet like that I've been careful to change my socks weekly, so those days are long gone.  Until now.  Those boxing gloves I carelessly selected from the Big Box Of Tinea reeked.  REEKED.  It was like corked wine poured through an old sock into a durian that an orangutan had been getting up close and personal with last week.

I was so paranoid that somebody (not least my Smaller Half) would think that it was me that smelled that bad that I found myself walking around during the halftime break saying, "Boy these gloves stink!  Whoo!  No sir, not me - the gloves!  The gloves, I say!"  In hindsight I think I would have been better off just changing gloves rather than attempting to manage the PR issue.  Remember the autopsy scene in Silence Of The Lambs, where they put something like Tiger Balm under their nostrils?  Next time, I'm right there.

Faded curtains

So did anybody else stuff up the start of daylight savings?  I always do, without fail.  This time I was lying in bed enjoying an extended snooze-in when the guy I was supposed to be meeting at noon for an afternoon of Sunday wargaming called and asked me where I was.  The best bit about daylight savings starting/ending is that moment when you make the transition from thinking "You're an idiot", to thinking "I'm an idiot".  It's like feeling the hemispheres of your brain swap places.

I like it so much that it's become kind of a tradition that I have no idea what's going on when it comes to dates and times.  Apparently it's a long weekend this weekend so I don't have to go to uni tomorrow.   I found this out on Thursday when one of my Esteemed Colleagues made a passing remark about how great it was going to be to have a four-day weekend.  "Ha ha ha", I said, "Er, what?"  Turns out we had Friday off and Monday too!

Product placement

I'm excited! 

Today while battling through the long-weekend crowds at the supermarket I found these corn holders:

We had ones like this when I was a kid.  You jam one into each end of an ear of corn and use them hold it when it's hot and buttery.  I wasn't much of a fan of corn when I was young but I liked using these things.  See how they look like tiny ears of corn?  How awesome is that?  And you can imagine how once they are in, they kind of look like little ear-shaped ears on the ear of corn.  It's ideas like this that made China the great nation it is today.

Sadly, I didn't have any corn in the fridge to show you them in action.  But you can use them for a lot more than just corn.  You can use them for apples:

You can use them for lemons:

You can use them for carrots:

You can use them for pieces of cheese if you don't slice it too thinly:

You can even use it for sticks of celery, with or without peanut butter:

Go out and buy some now.  Your life will never be the same.

Plants

Since I spend a lot of time gazing blankly out of windows, I find myself staring at plants a lot.  Staring at people just freaks them out, and plants are more diverse as well.  I like the way plants will grow just about anywhere, or at least try to.  Halfway up a cliff, there's a little sapling straining to stay upright.  There on the window sill of the 17th floor, it's a tuft of grass growing in the dust.

In a documentary I saw once about the rainforest the narrator said that the canopy is so thick that there isn't enough light getting through to ground level to allow any of the sapings to grow.  It's not until a big old tree dies and topples that the rest of the trees get a chance.  Whichever one gets the most light grows the fastest and eclipses the others, dooming them while it takes its place amongst the gods.

Desert plants used to baffle me.  Why oh why did they live in the desert where life is so tough?  And why would you grow on the rocky crest of a hill when you could grow in the valleys where the soil is richer and the water trickles down to you every morning?  Seems like plants were generally making some pretty poor life-choices.

It wasn't until much later that it occured to me that plants don't choose where they take root.  They get scattered as seeds and don't get much choice in where they land.  They just have to make do with their lot in life.  Some of them live in the desert and that's just the way it is.  They probably haven't even heard of the jungle.  And if you did move them there, even just for a holiday, they'd die.

Plants, huh?.  Maybe they're the smart ones.

Exhaustification

I'm rooted!  This week we've been doing quite a lot of role-plays to practise our GP consulting skills.  I've done one each day since people generally seem reluctant to get involved and I typically don't mind looking like an idiot since I'm accustomed to it.

The first day was really easy, I just had to run through a simple screening interview for smoking, nutrition, alcohol and exercise with a patient.  Not much to it, although I had to kind of make it up as I went along since I had no idea what I was really supposed to be doing.  Fortunately this blog is excellent practise for that kind of improvisation.

The second day was gruelling.  My task was to inform a patient that her biopsy results had come back and that she had breast cancer.  As an aside, the patients are all played by professional actors and they do an incredible job.  This woman was aghast and started crying.  By the end of the consult I had forgotten that I was doing it in front of the rest of the class, and I was on the verge of tears myself.  When I was talking to the class afterwards about how I thought it had gone, my voice was all tense and wobbly. 

It was incredibly emotionally draining.  I probably could have done with some counselling myself, since I couldn't help personalizing the whole thing and thinking of friends and relatives who have had cancer.  It seemed so real.  I'm glad I volunteered for it though, since it's only a matter of time before I have to do it for real.  I'm not sure that there is much of way that it could be done "well" but I'm quite certain that there are a whole lot of ways to do it awfully.

And today I got to run a consult with a woman who was the victim of domestic violence.  That was not so personal for me but that also made it harder in a way because I had less of an intuitive sense of what would be the right thing to say.  It was no less exhausting than the yesterday's session though, and produced a similar feeling that the rest of the world just faded away.  The tutor cut us off a couple of minutes early because it was the last session of the day and I felt all outraged and wanted to say, "But what about this poor woman, she needs more help!"

The strangest thing about it was that it was the same actor playing the breast cancer sufferer and the domestic violence victim in both cases.  I feel like I've gone through this intense emotional bonding with her and that we know each other so well, but it's not so of course since we were both just pretending.  Neurologists tell us though that imagining a situation is almost as useful when practising as actually doing it in real life, and pretending to experience emotions is almost as powerful as actually experiencing them.

No wonder Hollywood is so messed up.  Where's my limo???

Airplane cheese

So what's been happening?  I've just finished a three-week block of gruelling study devoted to rehabilitation and aged care.  Let me tell you, those guys have it pretty good.  Oh, not the aged - that is suboptimal in many ways - I'm talking about the rehab physicians and geriatricians.

Those guys have made a lifestyle choice.  For a start, there's no such thing as an rehab or aged care emergency.  Sure, bad stuff must happen all the time, but if it does you just say, "Someone get me an acute care specialist!" and go back to sleep. 

Rehab work seems great because basically you have no responsibility except to sit in a meeting once a week nodding your head for an hour while the physios and occupational therapists and speech therapists and nurses and all those other hardworking types update you on what's going on and you say, "Good work team!  Keep it up!  See you next week!" and take off.

Aged care work also seems great because old people are generally pretty nice.  Most people are jerks when they are young but gradually grow out of it.  By the time they are 60+ they've really mellowed out.  Come back and read this blog in 30 years and you'll notice that I make a lot fewer smartarse remarks and am in all ways a more pleasant person.  And I'll probably talk about bridge a lot too.

This week though I have launched into a week of intensive brainwork on GP-land.  Not Grands Prix - General Practice.  Lots of roleplaying in the arvos - today I got to be Dr Aardvark, a 5th level doctor with a +1 Stethoscope and a Manual Of Canny Diagnosis.  I vanquished an ornery patient in single combat and am expecting to level up real soon.

I struggled a bit in the morning because it was all lectures, which I think I have developed some kind of immune reaction to.  I especially dislike lecturers who engage in gratuitous audience participation.  This morning the guy would spend five minutes asking us for our opinions on why fish tanks might be soothing to patients in doctors' waiting rooms* before saying, "Actually no-one really know why they are so soothing, nobody has really looked into it", and continuing on to the next tangential vox-pop.  Aaaargh!

Anyway, it would be easy for me to sit here complaining, but in the end the day was great - there was free cheese for afternoon tea!  It was those little slabs of cheddar like tiny cholesterol tombstones that you get given on airplanes.  I ate four of them.  It was just like being on holiday.  To really seize the feeling, I smashed my kneecaps into the back of the chair in front of me and drank a lot of really awful luke-warm coffee then went and stood on one leg in the toilet and peed on the floor**.

Can't wait til tomorrow!

* gross misrepresentation of the truth for the purposes of sophistry.
** ditto.

Who am I?

Born at the age of 54 in northern Poland in 306 A.D., I became immediately famous for my rainbow-coloured mane.  I earned my doctorate from the university of Leipzig before becoming involved in the revision of the telephone numbering plan in Venezuela.

Although I am a colorless liquid, I became closed to navigation due to excessive growth of reeds in the 18th century.  While a member of the Kansas School Board I established a seaside resort town at the foot of the Hottentots Mountains and was pronounced king of the Carthaginian Empire.

My most famous novel, concerning the exploits of a password detection spyware cartel, was published in Guyana and was on average more than 400 metres wide.  Less well known are the curative powers of the waters that spring forth from me, for which I am revered as a god by some British rugby players.

Debuting on screen in the rom-com "The Many-Spotted Hummingbird", I finished my career languishing forgotten in the offices of an obscure Scottish architect before being fatally struck by a monster truck during the 1972 Le Mans 24-hour race.  I will be remembered forever for my contributions to babysitting, cooking, and sewing.

Who am I?

Another recipe

After the outstanding success of my previous recipe post, I've decided to add fuel to the fire.  Lo, and unto you I give...

Fish Fingers, Corn and Rice
3 fish fingers
1/2 cup frozen corn
Rice to taste

Cook the rice in a microwave or steamer until plump and moist, fresh with the heady promise of a new tomorrow.  With a song in your heart, fry the fish fingers in a pan until crisp and delicate like the very eidelweiss itself.  Zap that corn using centimetre-wavelength electromagnetic radiation until it's had enough.  Make it beg!

Break the fish fingers into thirds using brisk, stabbing motions of a fork.  Growl at the fish fingers and make biting motions to get warmed up.  Combine fish fingers with corn and rice and stir.  For a pan-European treat, add some mustard of any variety!  Eat on an old couch while you read comics.

Serves 1.

My new cookbook, "Prone to Roux-verie", will be published by Harper-Collins in December.  Pre-order as a satisfying stocking-stuffer!

Recipe suggestion

An old school friend of mine has recently started up a rather superb food blog.  Why not click here: [crispy & citrus] and go check it out?

In honour of her blog, it is my pleasure to present a recipe that I cooked back in the old days...

Fried Spam
1 tin of Spam

Get a frying pan real hot.  Open up the tin of Spam, get the Spam out, and cut the Spam into smallish bite-sized morsels.

Fry the shit out of that Spam.  I'm not using figurative speech here - a whole truck-load of Spam-fat is going to come out of that Spam.  Fry it!  Fry it til it's brown!

Let the Spam cool a bit.  Then grab 3 or 4 paper towels and use them to pick up the Spam.  Squeeze it hard and let more of that Spam-fat soak into those towels.  Repeat as often as necessary.  If times are tough, you could probably eat those paper towels soaked in Spam-fat, but otherwise throw them away. 

Serve the Fried Spam on top of steamed white rice in front of late-night TV motor-racing.  Mmmmm...

Hamplification

PTR

What's for dinner tonight?

Smaller Half
I'll make tuna pasta.

PTR

What about that bacon in the fridge?  Maybe you should use that.

Smaller Half
You can't eat bacon again.

PTR

When do I ever eat bacon?

Smaller Half
That bean stew that you made yesterday was mostly ham.

PTR

That's ham, not bacon.  It's totally different.

Smaller Half
No it's not.

PTR

Well, I had ham stew for dinner last night, and breakfast and lunch today, so only the last three meals I've eaten were ham.

Smaller Half
And brunch yesterday, you made bacon and eggs.

PTR

Oh yeah, so the last four.

Smaller Half
And Saturday night we had the Chinese roast pork for dinner.

PTR

That's not ham, that's pork.  It's totally different.

Smaller Half
What did you have for breakfast on Saturday?

PTR

I had that Korean thing which had no pork in it.  So it's only my last five consecutive meals which were ham.  Oh wait, I had the pork buns afterwards, so that makes six.  Maybe we should have tuna pasta tonight.

Bruxism

One of the biggest threats to our modern democratic society is the peril of Bruxism.  Most of us have never even heard of Bruxism, and those that have often remain tragically ill-informed afterwards as to the true nature of their encounter.  Bruxism is a real danger, but it would be alarmist to claim that the deluded followers of Brux are some kind of omnipotent shadowy organisation that cloaks the world in darkness.  Those times have long passed away, but Bruxism is with us still. 

The modern Bruxist is more likely to be a misled idealist rather than a fanatical killer, but this does not mean that we should be complacent.  The Bruxist is likely to be isolated, disorganised, naive, and impulsive in thought and action.  Yet he is hard to detect, intelligent, charming, and driven by his belief in Brux's tenets to foment great societal upheaval.  Of course the exposed or accused Bruxist will deny his affiliation in order to protect himself.  What is not widely known is that many people who would honestly espouse their revulsion of Bruxism nevertheless are unknowingly Bruxists of the most vibrant and sickening hue.

Simple ignorance of the true teachings of Brux is to blame.  Perhaps if there were some elementary teaching of Bruxism in our schools we could educate people to the danger of some of those seemingly reasonable beliefs.  There is, of course, the risk of exposing innocent youngsters to the meretricious and facile arguments in favour of Bruxism.  Some would no doubt fall into temptation and would need to be removed and re-educated.  But in the long run I believe our society would be stronger.  Our citizens would be better equipped to resist the unctuous whisperings of the Bruxist, promising so much, yet revealing so little of the truth.

Parents - I call on you today to teach your children more of Bruxism, not to endanger them but to tear back the veil from their eyes and let them see clearly how the enemy will come at them.  If you are brave and resolute, your children will be too, and we may yet have a chance of liberating the country, then the world, from the chains forged so quietly, so long ago, by Brux.

Brand name fail

We were watching the idiot box a few nights ago when my Smaller Half alerted me to an ad for Panasonic's new flat screen TV:

the Neoplasma!

What a terrible name!  Maybe they rejected the names Cancera and Tumoura during focus group testing.

Hopefully they won't be donating them to hospitals for use in the wards.

Investment

My future is assured because I have invested in it this week.  I'm going to be one happy old dude in about 40 years.

I am an astonishingly astute and skillful investor.  My strategy is to be contrarian - never follow the crowd.  For example, during the great housing boom of the late 90's, I was renting.  And during the great resources boom of the early 00's, I was buying shares in banks.  I worked for quite a while, carefully accumulating funds in the stock-market before deciding to live off my savings for 4 years while I studied medicine, just in time for the global financial crisis to break my portfolio's back in a manner akin to a camel being run over by a truck carrying straw.  Sadly the net effect of all this is that every day I need to carefully consider whether to invest in a cup of coffee or a pie.  On the plus side, it's made me acutely sensitive to the "value", or "basement", segment of the investment opportunity world.

As such, this week I decided to invest in one of my Esteemed Colleagues.  We played golf on Monday, and my shrewd eye told me he was a promising beginner.  So I bought a second-hand 5-iron and gave it to him as an early birthday present, telling him to practise, practise, practise.  It's already paying off - apparently with his first shot the ball went through his back door and into the kitchen.  You can't buy that kind of talent.  It has to be nurtured.

Anyway, why is this an investment?  Because he has agreed to give me 10% of his future earnings should he become a professional golfer.  That could be millions.  And if he doesn't, he has to give me a kidney if I need it.  How's that for a deal?  I haven't actually discussed it with him, but I'm sure he'll see sense when the time comes.

Best in show

New objective: stop getting my medical education from documentaries about show-dogs.  Wikipedia is much more reliable.

In a tute today the registrar who was tutoring us asked if we knew was syringomyelia was.  I said I did, saying that it was caused by swelling of the brain.  She shot me down, saying that what I was describing was actually syringobulbia.  Bummer.  Not much of a surprise though, since the source of my information was a BBC documentary I watched about a week ago about purebred show-dogs and the scarily high incidence of genetic disease in them because they are so inbred.  Apparently Cavalier King Charles Spaniels have a very high incidence of syringomyelia which leaves the animals in crippling pain.

The program said that syringomyelia was due to the animals' brains being too big for their skulls so they were squashed.  And they showed pictures of operations to relieve it, where they removed part of the back of the skull.  It was really awful.

Anyway, when I came home today and looked up syringomyelia on wikipedia I saw that it mentions that there is a form caused by swelling of the cerebellum.  Aha!  That sounds like what the dog-show show was showing.  Too bad I didn't look it up last week.

Might and right

Just a quick note on the two most recent polls that I've run here.  When asked, "Who wins?", 8 people chose "Might" while 3 people chose "Right".  I'm tempted to start an argument about the difference between pessimism and realism ... but not tonight, Josephine.

When asked, "Who would you like to see win?", 1 person chose "Might" and 5 people chose "Right".  I'm wondering why the person who wants to see "Might" win answered that way.  Seems odd to me...

Eating, golf, eating, eating

What a day!  What a day!  What a wonderful day! 

I discovered some interesting facts this morning in a lecture on malnutrition amongst the aged:

• Australia's population is ageing.  You yourself are probably older now than you were at this time last year.  
• By the year 2020, more than 357% of the population will be older than 65.
• The proportion of elderly people who are malnourished on admission to hospital is roughly 10-90%.
• Malnourishment can be reduced by eating more food.
  

I think we can all agree that those are some statistics that really should make us all agree on them.

After a hasty trip to the shopping centre where I purchased Close Encounters Of The Third Kind for less than ten bucks, followed by a hasty purchase of A Few Good Men for the same price in order to complete my library of films with lengthy titles, I headed off to the golf course.  Apparently there is an OSCE station at the end of the year where you have to chip out of the rough onto the green while avoiding the slice into a wicked bunker, and I intend to be ready for it.  Also apparently it's important for doctors to have golf clubs in the back of the Porsche to increase the downforce on the drive wheels.

Anyway, five of us got together and played 9 holes of Ambrose.  Ambrose is where you all tee off, then you choose who hit the best shot and you all play your next shot from where that ball is.  We modified it slightly so that once we were near the green you had to hit your own ball.  That format works well for me since only slightly more than 11% of my tee shots go where I want them to, whereas my chipping is surprisingly effective considering I have no idea what I'm doing.  I told my Smaller Half tonight, "I got in some awesome chip shots today!" and she got all cranky with me since she thought I said, "I got in some awesome chip shops today!" and hence had formed the mistaken impression that I'd spent my day driving from chip shop to chip shop on some kind of fried potato smorgasbord extravaganza.  No, but great idea though.

It was a beautiful day for golf, though I did start to get weary toward the end because I hadn't eaten any pies yet.  In fact, I haven't eaten any pies since Friday since, as they say, "Friday's Pie-day!". (As distinct from Pi-day, which is March 14.  Or you can approximate it on 22 July.) As far as I know, Pie-day was started by some younger blokes who worked for me a while back when I was a shiny-bummed public servant.  They told me about it and said I was welcome to come along.  So I did go along but it was kind of awkward, as it always is when your boss unexpectedly accepts your token invitations that you didn't really think he would accept, so I never went again.

Nevertheless, Pie-day stuck in my head and in my heart as a perfectly sound excuse to eat more pies more often.  I've been telling people about it and finally I think there is a groundswell of support.  Last Pie-day I was able to egg three people into eating pies with me.  One misguided chap bought a pasty - the less said about that the better.  (Except this - the pasty is the white-man's curry-puff.  Which would you rather have?)

I think this Pie-day coming could be the biggest yet.  It tees off at 1pm.  Are you excited?

Love is also

Love is also when you are all psyched up to watch Aliens and you're ready with your classic Aliens quotes and at the last minute your Smaller Half rushes in all excited saying, "Anne of Green Gables is on TV!" and you end up watching it with her and quite enjoying it even though you fall one gender and at least 20 years out of the target demographic.

Game over, man, game over!

Love is

You know what love is? Love is when you're away from your Smaller Half for a week and you decide that you'd better leave your mobile phone on overnight in case she gets the creeps in the middle of night and needs to call you but you forget to tell her this and she knows that you normally turn it off overnight because for some strange reason you get more than your fair share of wrong numbers so she decides to send you a text msg at 1 a.m. when you're already asleep because she's been up late studying and she misses you and because your msg alert tone on your phone sounds like a barking dog you are awakened from a deep sleep by your phone barking right into your ear and you have no idea what the hell is going on for a while but then you read the message and it makes you miss her.

That's love.

Doubt

Today was one of those days that made me wonder if I am really cut out to be a doctor.  I actually quite enjoyed what I learned today, but I am suffering from Colleague-Induced Psychosis.  Don't get me wrong - I love my Esteemed Colleagues deeply - but sometimes I think some of them are barking mad.

I was thinking of running a quiz, getting people to choose between, "PTR is a weirdo" and "PTR is surrounded by weirdos" to resolve the issue once and for all.  But since I've already figured out that you, Gentle Readers, are largely a bunch of dog-loving, macadamia-munching poll fraudsters, I think I'll pass on seeking your opinion on myself.

So what freaked me out today?

Well, it was my first real day back after 10 days of holiday and another week of "research" and a few days of a slow start to this week.  Suddenly I was plunged back into a situation where awful things were happening, such as being asked to remember stuff that I sat an exam in about two weeks back - and I couldn't remember.  As for stuff that I should probably have learned back in first year (and presumably did, otherwise I wouldn't be here in second year) - no chance.  Yet somehow I find myself in a room with various eidetic freaks who can rattle this stuff on as if they're on Are You Smarter Than A 5th-Grader.  Fun fun fun.

It didn't help that later on we were shown some videos of people getting their tonsils out.  Eurgh!  Some people really like surgery.  Michael Jackson, for instance.  I don't.  Some types of surgery don't bother me too much.  Anything done with via remote control from across the room is sufficiently abstract that it doesn't bother me.  But watching someone jam clamps and knives down some poor bastard's throat and yank their tonsils out just makes me feel ill.  It looked grotesque.  Like someone turning a mouse inside out.  I can't believe that people really want to do that.  You lunatics - you know who you are!

I am quite squeamish about anything above the shoulders.  Necks, throats, ears, eyes, mouths, faces.  It's all bad.  Brains are okay, probably because we never really see them so they don't really seem to actually exist in real people (though I am assured that they do). It does make me wonder how I'm going to cope the first time someone staggers into my emergency room with a smashed-in face when I'm an intern.  Maybe I'll volunteer to bandage his sprained ankle.

No, I'm sure I'll be fine.  It's all a process of acclimatisation.  Two years ago I probably would have freaked out if I'd walked into an room to find severed body parts on trays waiting for me, but now that seems quite reasonable.  There's an ongoing renovation of my mind happening.  I like the colour scheme, but it does seem quite echo-y.  Needs more rugs, methinks.

Happiness

The secret to happiness is to drive at the speed limit.

It's probably not the secret to happiness for the rich bastard behind me in the Maserati who would prefer to blow my doors in and leave me staring up his tailpipe, but it suits me just fine to cruise along at 100. 

I have a funny relationship with speed limits.  In town I don't speed at all.  I'm actually quite paranoid about the idea of hitting a pedestrian, so if there are people or even footpaths anywhere nearby I'm very law-abiding.  If the sign says 60, that's what I'll do.  I'll even slow down to 50 or 40 if told to.  I go 70 in the 70 zones and 80 in the 80 zones.  But once the number in the big red circle says 100, I'm off!  Peeeeow!

I'm not a rev-head.  I don't drag people off at the lights or do that stupid thing where you weave through traffic just to get to the next red light 5 seconds earlier.  But for some reason, 100 km/h on the open road seems a bit too slow.  So normally I'll go ever so slightly faster. (For you non-law-enforcement-types, about 115 or so.)

Of course, that mean that you catch up to the slow-coaches and sometimes get cranky with them.  I'm a cautious overtaker so I don't do anything rash, but it means that I get frustrated when I'm stuck behind a bus or a truck or a senior citizen or a learner or ... anything but a Maserati really.  Because I have a tendency to leave at the last possible moment it usually means that I have to rush to get there a little bit late so typically I arrive at B feeling tense and on edge.

So yesterday I conducted a bold experiment.  I left half an hour earlier than usual and stuck to the speed limit all the way.  I got there with ten minutes to spare and tooled around for a while looking for a park, but of course there was nothing.  Normally this would have me cursing and sulking but I felt great equanimity and was at peace with the cosmos.  That made it much easier to get through three hours straight of a lecture from a guy who walks around with his hands down the back of his pants.

On the way home I stuck to the speed limit again, and I took it one step further.  I turned off the radio and drove in silence.  I felt like I was a tree - a true child of the universe, putting down deep roots in the forest and growing towards the light.  A tree driving a car.  On a journey from the past into the future.  Awesome!

I arrived home feeling ... not ebullient ... but full.  Full of a sense of knowing who I am and not being distracted by all the crap in the world.  Since then I've had a greatly decreased desire to issue scathing critiques, snide remarks, and sarcastic rejoinders.  So if it seems like I've had a personality transplant, maybe I have.  I am now a mighty gum tree, spreading its branches wide, and gently swaying from side to side.

Peace.

Truth

It's time to set the record straight.  Some people are whipping up hysteria by spreading rumours of certain events that are reputed to have occurred during last week's trip to Renmark.  These rumours are baseless, I tell you, baseless!  More specifically:

1. Nobody ate 9 quarter chickens on Monday night.  The exact total is uncertain but I lost count after 8, so anyone claiming anything different is a scurrilous liar.
2. Pelicans can not defeat humans in single combat.  Especially not really fat pelicans.  Unless there's a bacon and egg roll involved.
3. I am actually a good pool player.
4. My digestion is functional.
5. I am fully committed to the research team and care deeply about the integrity of its results.
6. Meat pies are a healthy part of breakfast, lunch AND dinner.  It's the Australian way.
7. It is possible that my airway was temporarily blocked by a piece of chicken.  Or meat pie.  Or pelican.  But I don't have sleep apnoea.
   
8. It was the vinyl mattress reflecting my body heat back at me that caused the problem rather than any kind of metabolic disorder.

Please ignore any information to the contrary.  The people spreading it are scoundrels of the highest degree.

Weekend fun

Aaaargh, stupid essay.  I have to hand in a 1500-word essay tomorrow.  I'm up to about 800 words.  It was actually due on Friday but I got an extension because the university sent me out to the country to do a pointless research project and play a lot of pool.  I guess I could have done it yesterday but we spent the day in the city then I spent the evening attaching pegs to my face, then we stayed up until 2am watching The Iron Giant on DVD. 

Accordingly, we slept in really late today, then sat by the sea eating almond croissants and drinking coffee, before going off to the beach to watch whales and their calves loll around in the surf and lazily wave their flippers and tails at us then coming home to eat bacon and eggs for dinner.  I was eating the bacon rinds off my Smaller Half's plate when she welcomed me to middle age by asking me to stop so I didn't die of a heart attack.

I ate no more bacon rinds because, despite the essay, this is the life...

Current events

We went to a charity quiz night tonight.  I generally like quiz nights.  They can be annoying when you're stuck on a table with someone who is thick but doesn't realize it (Dunning-Kruger effect) so they keep writing down wrong answers. Not that I'm obsessed with winning.  Not at all.

Anyway, we completely destroyed the opposition tonight.  We broke them into small pieces then ate them then pooped them out and watched them get rolled away by dung beetles to rot underground and be slowly devoured by their larvae.  Ha ha!  It was the most awesome trivia team I have ever been part of.  On the team we had two medical students (me and my Smaller Half), three general practitioners, a professor of marketing, and a retired neurosurgeon.

Funny thing is though, we didn't come first.  We came second because throughout the night there were special "features" whereby teams could steal points from one another, and all the other teams chose to steal from us.  By the end of the night we'd lost our substantial lead and ended up losing by two points.  Even then, it should still have been a tie, but for two things.

First, in the "Pain Game" I was only able to attach 18 clothes pegs to my face in 30 seconds, whereas the winner attached 19 pegs.  I forgot my eyebrows, which was pretty dumb.  On the plus side, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get my picture in the paper with my face covered in clothes pegs.  The Dean of the medical school likes it when we engage with the local community, so I think he'll be really proud of me.

And the second thing that robbed us of the win was that one of the questions was marked incorrectly.  The question was, "True or false: electric current flows from the positive terminal to the negative terminal".  Everyone else at my table insisted that the answer was false because they were clever enough to know that the electrons flow from the negative to the positive.  But I explained to them that the question asked about current, and current is defined as the equivalent movement of positive charges.  I convinced them all to answer "True" and then it was marked as wrong.

What a bunch of crap.

Believe me folks - current flow is in the opposite direction to the movement of electrons.  I have a Masters degree in electrical engineering.  I know what I'm talking about.  Or you could read it in Wikipedia.

That prize rightly belongs to me.  Please mail it to "Pegface c/o School of Medicine".
 

I'm back!

Hello loyal fans, critics, readers and wanderers.  I have returned from my week in the wilderness.  Normal service resumes shortly.  Until then, why not warm up a hatful of milk in the oven and pour it over some of your favourite books?

Try this at home

A good way to give yourself the heebie-jeebies late at night when you're lying in bed and can't get to sleep is to listen carefully to the sounds that the possums make as they run across your roof and imagine that they are not being made by possums but by small grey rubbery-fleshed men trying to figure out how to get into your house.  It is especially effective to do this on a windy night so that you can hear them tapping and scratching at the windows.  Once that has got you thinking, stick your feet out the end of your bed for a while, then start to think about whether it's possible that one of those small grey rubbery-fleshed men has somehow crept into your room and is about to seize you around the ankle with his cool dry hand.  Keep your feet out of the end of the bed for as long as you can.  Make sure you don't ever open your eyes. 

Blip

Hey guess what?  Someone's been reading my blog!

No, not just this post, like you.  I mean, someone's been the reading the whole darn thing!  Check out my page hits graph from google:

 

As far as I can tell, those 400-odd hits a couple of days ago are spread pretty evenly across the whole of my blog, so it seems likely that it's one person steadily churning their way through everything rather than a bunch of people all happening across something fascinating at the same time.

Hello mystery-man!  I hope you enjoyed my blog (because if you didn't, you seriously over-committed to reading it...) - any suggestions?

Darth Octopus

It's quiz time! Yaaaaay!

I did a quiz from a mob called BrainHex. I'm excited by it because it combines my three greatest passions: personality quizzes, neuroanatomy, and games! It purports to be a personality quiz centred on what type of games you like to play. It gives you your results in terms of seven different characteristics and their associated brain regions, and presents the results in terms of a funky graphic.

Here's my results:

Your BrainHex Class is Mastermind.
Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Mastermind-Conqueror.

You like solving puzzles and devising strategies as well as defeating impossibly difficult foes, struggling until you eventually achieve victory, and beating other players. You do not enjoy feeling afraid, preferring to feel safe or in control.

Mastermind: 16
Conqueror: 14
Seeker: 11
Socializer: 10
Achiever: 8
Daredevil: 3
Survivor: 0

Here are some amusing quotes from the descriptions of Mastermind and Conqueror types:

Your major brain region is the orbito-frontal cortex, an area just behind and above the eyes involved in making decisions, and the nucleus accumbens (or “pleasure centre”) which is closely linked to it.

Your chemical messenger is dopamine, which is chemically similar to cocaine, and is involved in habit formation.

If you were an animal, it would be an octopus.

Your behaviour is forceful – you channel your anger in order to achieve victory and thus experience fiero, the intense emotion which causes you to punch the air.

So to sum it all up, I'm a nerdy, crack-head, dark-side-of-the-Force octopus. Yeaaaahh!!

Wanted

You know what would be really cool? It would be really cool if Mr Google (or someone real smart like him or Senator Fielding) would put a button on my blog so that when I clicked it, it took me to other blogs by people who write similar stuff to me. Presumably I would enjoy reading such blogs. I have re-read parts of my own blog and I enjoyed most of it, when I wasn't obviously trying too hard to be funny or bizarre.

There's a button at the top of my blog called, "Next blog", and originally I thought it was a magic button like the one I want, but for some reason when I click it I just get random other blogs, almost all of which are written in Spanish or Asian or some other language that I don't even recognise. Like this: "Bálint az utóbbi időben két új szokással bővítette a repertoárt." At first I thought it was Finnish because of all the double letters but I don't think Finnish has so many accented letters. Maybe it's Turkish or Magyar. Or Asian. Why does Mr Blogger take me to these blogs?

Google Reader sometimes recommends blogs to me. But they are all pretty bland stuff, not the fiery polemics and champagne comedy that I write. It seems to think I'm interested in What's On In Adelaide (I'm not), AFL News (I'm not), or gossip sites from Singapore (I'm not). Google fail.

I know a few people who write blogs, but they are infrequent at best. Boooo! Hissss! Can anyone point me in the direction of anything interesting?

Ethnic

I was looking for tinned bamboo shoots in the supermarket today - I need them to make a Burmese chilli bamboo and tomato dish from the most excellent cookbook Hsa-ba that a friend gave me (well, gave my Smaller Half, but I have annexed it for my own use, muahahahah!).

So I went looking for bamboo shoots in the "canned vegetables" aisle. No luck. Aaah, I thinks, they hides the precious bamboo shootses in the "Asian Foods" section! And sure enough, there they were, along with all the other food from the far off lands of Asia.

Does anyone else think that the Asian Foods section concept is ridiculously anachronistic? Rice is Asian, but it's not there. Soy sauce is Asian, but it's not there. There are plenty of Asian vegetables that live together with occidental vegetables in perfect harmony. They'd be better off calling it the "Stuff White People Don't Know How To Use" section. Or perhaps more accurately, the "You Don't Find This At The RSL Club" section.

Considering how diverse Asian food is, lumping it all together seems perverse. Perhaps the true purpose of it is to quarantine the weird stuff away from the prying eyes of casual shoppers so they don't give themselves fits when they realize they can't read some of the writing on the label.

While I was pondering all this, and also marvelling at the fact that they did actually have bamboo shoots, I noticed that there is one other "ethnic" food section in my local supermarket. I'd run a poll on getting you to guess what it was but I'm in full flight so I'll do it rhetorically.

Was it Mexican? No.

Was it Lebanese? No.

Was it Italian? No.

Was it Somali? As if.

Was it Dutch? Oh yes, my friend, the two powerhouses of world cuisine are, apparently, Asian and Dutch. Just imagine how delicious food from the Dutch East Indies must be!

So what's in the Dutch Food section? Apparently Dutch people mostly eat:

• gingerbread,
• almond biscuits,
• apple sauce, and
  
• something called fritessaus that could be either like mayonnaise or tomato sauce or maybe mustard or maybe all three or perhaps even a subset thereof, but to judge from the name is squeezed onto chips.
  

To steal a quote from Yoda, "How you get so big, eating food of this kind?"

I can see why you'd need to have a separate section of the aisle specifically for such delights though. I mean, if you put the gingerbread and almond biscuits in with the other types of biscuits, God knows what might happen!

Pasghetti

When did pasta get so fancy-pants? I remember when I was a youngster, having spaghetti for tea meant being given a big bowl of spaghetti with butter on top. Grated coon was an optional extra.

I think these Italians mean well with their sauces full of tomatoes or cream or small animals. But let's face it - nobody knows pasta like country town Australian home cooks.

Thunderstruck

Last night was a relief. Exams finally over. When I called my Smaller Half afterward she said that it was stormy down here, but by the time I got home it had all blown out to sea. We sat looking out over the water and as the darkness fell we could see the flashes of lightning playing across the clouds on the horizon.

I love thunderstorms. When the blue clouds gather I cross my fingers and hope it gets loud. I'm always a bit surprised when people tell me they are frightened of them. To me it seems a bit feeble, as if you were a family dog that should know better but can't help cowering under the verandah anyway. (For those of you who are frightened of thunder, feel free to point and laugh at me when I squeal and spasm at a tiny little spider.)

I think the reason I like thunderstorms is that when I was kid I really enjoyed blackouts. Our thunderstorms usually happened in the early evening and night, so my enjoyment of blackouts was maximised. Blackouts during the daytime are no fun at all. They are just an inconvenience. You wonder why the fridge light doesn't turn on when you open the door, and notice that the radio doesn't work. Given that it isn't even dark, daytime blackouts are not worthy of the name. They should just be called fridge-outs.

But night-time blackouts are superb. The whole rhyme and reason of the evening is overturned unexpectedly. No television. No proper dinner. No lights to read by. I think I enjoyed it that all of a sudden the whole family was forced together by having our routine ripped away. It was a surprise mini-holiday, a gift from the gods. Not only did we not have to do anything, we couldn't do anything. Not our usual stuff anyway. That improvisational feeling of suddenly having to make do was a thrill for me.

I always felt sad when the power came back on. It was like being engrossed in a childhood game and suddenly being interrupted by an adult walking into the room saying, in their big loud voice, "What are you kids doing?", and all you could think of to say was, "Just playing", and the magic was lost. When the power came back the lights would flick a few times then come on for good, the fridge motor would start to hum again, and we'd all blink at each other a few times as fantasy land was snatched away, and we'd all slowly disperse and wander off to do whatever it was we normally did.

I think the next time you find yourself frittering away the evening you should sneak outside and flip the power off in your house. Bust out the candles, sit together in a room, and see what happens.

Major Major

Got my prac exam at 2pm today. Which means that I have to spend all this morning waiting for it. I don't like afternoon exams. I have a policy of never trying to learn anything new on the day of the exam since I don't think it's worth it. There's a tradeoff between knowing useful information and freaking yourself out. I've got to get myself in The Zone. For me, there is no point stressing myself out trying to get that extra 1% if it means rattling myself and hence losing 10% because I make stupid mistakes.

So that means that I have to spend all this morning revising. And I don't like revising on the day of exams either, for much the same reason. There's always something you thought you knew but now can't remember. And there's not too much point freaking out about it at the last minute. I've made my bed - time to sleep in it. (That's a metaphor - I don't make my bed, nor am I about to go to sleep.) That's why early morning exams are great. You wake up, stagger off to the exam, do it in a daze, and stagger home again. Perfect for suppressing those traumatic memories.

Nevertheless, since my exam isn't until 2pm, it seems a bit stupid to just spend the morning strolling off to the shop for coffee and writing stuff in my blog. So I decided to bust out some old anatomy flash cards that my Smaller Half has, but that I haven't really looked at.

There are a couple of hundred of them just on muscles and bones, which is all I need to know this arvo. At first I was a bit intimidated by how many there were, but the drawings are very good and it turns out that I seem to know most of what I think I need to know (how subjective was that??). So I was just flipping through them, trying to get them right but also trying hard not to try too hard because that might make me freak out.

Then I got to a card with the muscles of the anterior thorax (or as I like to call it, the front of the chest). The card had two numbered arrows, which I believed pointed to the sternal head of pectoralis major and the clavicular head of pectoralis major. Pretty easy. But then I flipped the card over to find that the twits who produced this deck of cards seem to think that the clavicular head of pectoralis major is actually pectoralis minor. Aaargh! You eeeediots!

What the heck is the point of going through flash cards if they are trying to make me learn wrong stuff? Guess I'll go back to strolling around and writing on my blog.

Veracity

A week or so ago I'd been doing the annoying-med-student thing to my Aged Mother and telling her all the reasons why exercise was good for her. I was chatting to her this afternoon on the phone:

Aged Mother
You know, everything you told me last week about exercise was absolutely spot-on!

PTR
Oh really?

Aged Mother
Yes, I read all about it in Reader's Digest today.

I'm glad that my information has been checked against such a reliable source. If Reader's Digest agrees with everything that I've learned from wikipedia, I can sleep soundly tonight.

Ink for the Ink God!

I think I might have become hypoxic in my car en route to my exam this morning. I felt normal, but three different people all said to me, "You look too happy". Fair enough too, who wants to be faced with a hairy grinning idiot just before you go into your exam? At least no-one beat me up. Yet.

While waiting in the corridor to go in I noticed that one of my Esteemed Classmates was carrying a pair of shorts. I asked him if he was really expecting the exam to be that scary. He put them over his head and said, "I'm going to plead insanity". It really made me laugh and was a good way to detensionify before the exam.

The exam itself was a whirlwind of ink and paper. I wrote non-stop for the whole 90 minutes which is very rare for me. Usually I finish early and take off but this was a seriously intense exam. Ten questions, so that's nine minutes for each question. I think the whole thing would have been much easier if we'd had ten minutes for each question. Not just because we'd have had 11.1% more time, but because I found it confusing trying to add up all those nines in my head to try and figure out if I was going to be able to finish the exam or not. Even using the power of multiplication didn't help that much because then I had to use subtraction and division to work out how much time I had left per question. Honestly - just make the time per question a nice round number and save me some grief.

Now all I have left is the prac exam tomorrow, which will consist of identifying various parts of the human anatomy from real live, err dead, specimens. Here's a tip for my Esteemed Colleagues: the knee has the patella nearby. The elbow doesn't. Buy me a drink if it comes up.

Daisy daisy

That's one down, two to go. So - this morning's exam ... either it was surprisingly easy or I forgot to do about half of it. Hmm. I guess I'll find out in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed.

Of course, there were things on there that I didn't know and other things that I had a decent guess at, but on the whole whoever set it was very gentle with us. Perhaps that's because last year the average mark was 43% - at least that's what I heard. I have no idea how such rumours get started, but I intend to perpetuate them.

There was certainly a lot of stuff that I busted a gut to learn that didn't turn up at all on the exam, and I am totally fine with that. I've never understood the mentality of people who bitch and moan about exams being "too easy". Don't laugh - some people do. They seem to feel they've been cheated of the opportunity to stomp their classmates into the floor.

I'm trying to work up the motivation to look at the stuff for tomorrow's exams - bones and muscles and stuff. I've already succeeded in forgetting everything I know about psychiatry and neurology, so that's a solid start.

Sitting here pretending to study while my Smaller Half cleans the house is great - until she walks past and sees the blogger logo and busts me! Whoops - gotta run!

[edit: new poll up. Choose a pet. Mais, attendez - is it mere happenstance that they are listed in the order they are? I think not! Dogs eat cats, and cats eat fish, and fish eat mice, and mice eat birds! Aha!]

Good luck

Exams start tomorrow. Good luck to everyone in my class.

Also, good luck to everyone else. It would be a bit churlish of me to not wish you luck simply because you don't have a test tomorrow.

What would you do if you knew you really did have a lucky day coming up? Would you gamble? Invest? Buy a ticket on the Love Boat? Get all your medical tests done? Send your first draft to every publishing house in the land?

Why aren't you doing those things anyway?

Psychiatry

Psychiatry exam tomorrow! It's a bit troublesome to prepare for, since they don't seem to require us to actually know anything.

Oh sure, we have to know the effects and side effects of a range of drugs, and know the common presenting symptoms of the most common psychiatric complaints. But hey, since psychiatrists basically make it up as they go along, they're going to have difficulty marking us wrong unless we write something really really stupid.

That's why I'm just going to write:

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in one's own.

Helloooo psychiatry prize 2009 - start writing my name on that little beauty right now!

War ward

Hey I need some help from you people. You know how if someone has been injured a lot recently in professional sport, the commentators will say, "He's been in the wars a lot recently". Or do they say, "He's been in the wards a lot recently"?

Both of them make sense and it's really hard to tell which one it is. Or is it something else entirely?

I have a horror of mispronuniciating things like this. One of my Esteemed Colleagues pointed out to me that one of our lecturers used the phrase, "for all intensive purposes", and he wasn't talking about intensive care. Things like that make me wish I carried around a big gong. I'd stand right up in class and bash the gong like those old Rank Arena clips before daytime telemovies. And then I'd say, "FAIL!"

And then my lecturer would say, "FAIL!" and he'd ask my name, and I'd tell him his own name, and he'd be like, "Really? What a coincid... wait - what's your real name?", and I'd run out of the lecture theatre and quickly shave my beard off and then walk back in like I was a different guy and say, "Boy you sure scared him off!" and then we'd all laugh and be best friends.

Back to the study I guess...

Nut poll

Wow. 60% of you voted for the macadamia. Still, I shouldn't be surprised. Even Pauline Hanson was popular.

Ghost in the peanut

Yesterday I figured out that lying down to sleep mid-afternoon is not only a great way to blow off the whole rest of the afternoon, it's also a great way to make sure you can't get to sleep that night. For some reason I had the word "anisocoria" whizzing round in my head too. Does that ever happen to you? It happens to me all the time. I'll hear or read a strange, novel word and for the next few days it just zings round inside my head.

Sometimes, especially when I'm trying to get to sleep, it's as if the word is a weight on the end of a piece of string. It swings round every couple of seconds and whacks me right in the head. ANISOCORIA! And in between I can feel the tension in that string - feel it twist and buzz through the air. ANISOCORIA! It's incredibly annoying, let me tell you.

If the word is really tenacious it can stick for years. I've had the phrase "loya jurga" stuck in my head since late 2001 when the US invaded Afghanistan. I think it's some kind of tribal council, and I can't even remember if that's how you spell it, but it's such a nice round euphonious word that I think I'll always have it close by in my head. It's like rolling a smooth cool pebble around in my mouth.

One thing that studying medicine is really great for (oh yeah, you can make sick people well again, so that's two things!) is that your vocab really picks up. This is great for Scrabble. I played the word "talus" the other day. Sweet! I'd never heard of the talus (ie: ankle bone) until a few weeks ago but now there it is on my board. I don't think I'll be playing "anisocoria" any time soon though. It's a bit long.

Oh, and one more thing to mention. I find that while I'm studying the brain I find myself straining to actually feel my brain doing stuff. For example, I'll be reading about the basal ganglia and I'll be sitting there half convincing myself that when I wiggle my fingers, I can feel a little buzzy zap go rushing from one part of my brain to another and eventually down my spine and out through my arm.

Another great game to play is to try to surprise yourself by wiggling your fingers unexpectedly. I sit there for a while staring at my un-wiggling fingers, thinking, "no, no, no, no, no, no, n-YES!- but really I did that on purpose so it doesn't count". You should try it right now, it's a blast. In fact, I think it could be the underground street hit of 2009. Get in early.

Anyway, that's probably more insight than you really needed into how my mind works. I'd just like to qualify all of the above with the following points:

1. I've got exams next week so I'm quite stressed.
2. I'm a terrible procrastinator so I'm quite bored.
3. I do exaggerate an awful lot.
4. I have a hard-earned reputation for eccentricity that must be maintained.

Thanks for reading.

Collective nouns

Update: the International Committee On Medical Nomenclature (Professional), of which I am Chairperson, has released its draft list of official collective nouns for medical specialists. We are now calling for public comment.

A movement of gastroenterologists.
A cauldron of endocrinologists.
A battery of neurologists.
A follicle of pathologists.
A station of radiologists.
A herd of audiologists.
A convention of psychiatrists.
A chamber of cardiologists
A retention of urologists
A shot of anaesthetists.
A factor of immunologists.
A mass of surgeons.
A perfection of general practitioners.

Solipsism

Study proceeds as planned. Prognosis cautiously positive.

One of the things that's worked in my favour is that I've exceeded my monthly download cap and have been throttled back to 64k. This is fast enough to use wikipedia to check stuff, but too slow to waste time on facebook or watch people falling over on failblog.org or any of the other things that I find myself doing instead of studying. It's funny that my connection being so slow as to waste my time prevents me from wasting my time. Whoa - deep...

However, I am a resourceful chap, so I've found alternative ways to distract myself. What's working well for me at the moment is engaging in idle speculation about stuff. For example, at the moment I'm attempting to review (or more accurately, to learn) neurology. Lots of things about various parts of the brain connecting up to other parts in different places and making them go zoink. (Terminology: if it goes zoink on the same side as the bit of brain that's doing the zoinking, it's ipsilateral. If it's on the opposite side, it's contralateral.)

So I started wondering about those words. Contralateral makes sense - it clearly means opposite side - contra-lateral. Contra- is pretty common word root, like contraband or contrary or contrast. But ipsi- is more unusual. If something is legal, is it ipsiband? If someone is agreeable, are they ipsary? And so on. I can chew up a lot of time thinking about stuff like that.

To solve this urgent curiosity crisis I busted out the online etymology dictionary, which is a great site because there's no high-bandwidth crap to slow it down and hence drive me back to my work. Sadly, ipsilateral is not in it. But when I searched for ipsi- I found that it's part of the word solipsism. Sol-ipse-ism = alone-self-belief. It's the belief that you are the only real being in existence. This is a belief that often occurs to me during swot-vac when I'm glued to my desk for a week and don't see anybody else. Maybe there's been a war out there and the world is over but I didn't notice.

Nah, I would have read about it on facebook if that was true. Sigh - back to the work...

Poll underway

And maybe I'm getting a little paranoid here, but I'm starting to suspect that one or two of you are playing funny-buggers with my current poll regarding nuts. Why? Well:

1. The very day I put it up there were about 8 votes, which is very strange.
2. The interim results show a marked preponderence for one particular nut which in my view is "not all that".
3. A few of you seemed to take great delight in screwing around with my previous poll, or at least winding me up by claiming to have done so.
4. It's already the most-voted-on poll of mine EVER. And there's a way to go still. Hmmm.

Come on folks, play fair. Let's give nuts the respect they deserve.

Study, or the lack thereof

Urrrrgh - I feel like I'm thinking in slow motion. I've gotten not much done since yesterday, and I blame my lecturer. In the final class he did a demo answer from a past exam for us. It was actually really encouraging to see how low the bar is set in terms of what is an acceptable answer. He doesn't want any explanation, he's happy with just splatting it all down on the page in whatever order it falls out of your brain.

While this is great, since it means that I don't have any grounds for being stressed about that exam any more, it's terrible too because it means that I am now taking it way too easy. Particularly since the other exam I have to sit currently looks fiendishly difficult to me. I looked at a previous paper and it was scary stuff.

Having said that, my mother assures me that I am a genius and of course I'll do brilliantly. So I guess I'll waste tonight too... :)

Night driving

As I drove home, the sun was setting. It's a beautiful time of year to see such a beautiful time of day. At one point there are a lot of almond trees just finishing blossoming and just starting sprouting leaves. In the golden sunset light, for some reason undoubtedly involving physics, their bare trunks seem to glow a soft purple. It's a total Monet rip-off.

As the sun continued to set and it got dark enough that I realized that if something ran onto the road I wouldn't see it in time to avoid it so I'd better turn on my headlights, the dimness and the headlights of oncoming cars reminded me of how much I like driving at night. The dodging of, and occasional impact with, unfortunate animals on the road is a downside of course, for all parties involved. There's plenty of kangaroos lurking in the bush, with supplementary amounts of wild ass and stray sheep, so you've got to be careful.

But that's a practical issue. On an aesthetic level, driving at night is like magic. Your car floats through space. Ahead of you, the twin tracer beams of red and white stretch out like a runway. When I was a kid and had to sit in the middle of the back seat because I was the youngest and we were all crammed into the car returning from a family holiday at the beach, I really enjoyed being able to see out through the windscreen. I'd see the reflected light, stationary in the distance but flicking past fast in my peripheral vision, and I would pretend that I was in Battlestar Galactica, in that glowy tunnel that they would lauch the Vipers from.

And as the night wore on and I gradually nodded off, all I could see was the dim glow of the instrument panel. The lights in the heater and radio switches, bobbing up and down in time with my sleepy head, rocking me to sleep.

If I was rich, I would always get someone to drive me around at night just before I went to sleep. Ideally I'd have a bed actually in the car, or perhaps the car could drive right up into my bedroom and roll me gently out onto my house-bed. It would be so soothing. I wonder if I can get REM to write a song about it?

qanda rage

I really shouldn't watch Q&A. (Especially while trying to simultaneously learn how the hand works. The hand does a lot of stuff folks. Yes indeedy. Like typing these words for instance. That uses the typus digiti erroneii muscle.)

Yet again I am left filled with rage. Tonight was even worse than last week because the audience and panel were stacked with people who only seemed to be capable of processing one idea at a time.

Debt? "That's bad!"
Education? "We want more!"
Teaching? "I can't spell!"
Utegate? "I ate my hat!"

Poor old Julia Gillard battled away trying to explain the concept of tradeoffs, being that if you have one thing, it stops you having something else. And the notion that if something is better than it used to be, that might be a good thing rather than a failure to achieve utter perfection.

Meanwhile Malcolm Turnbull tut-tuts his way along, accusing Julia of being out of touch. Because you know that Malcolm spends a lot of time down at the youth centres, don't you? Don't you?? He's such a sniping, patronising opportunist. And the Young Liberals (and, to be fair, young lefties too) all sit there whining about how old people ignore them despite their manifest genius while coming up with nothing but inane speeches parading their own feeble resumes.

Tony Jones - you've got to whip it into shape! Shape it up, get straight! Go forward, move ahead! Try to detect it! It's not too late to whip it - whip it good!

Freem!

Poll results finalized! 14 votes, which is another good response, excluding the distinct possibility that some of you twerps voted multiple times for a whole range of dumb reasons. But thanks for your participation! I really admire the fact that you are trying your best to read and stuff.

Anyway, 50% of you thought that really big ray-guns go "pew pew pew!" which, to be honest, surprised me. I think you'll find that it's tiny little ray-guns that go "pew pew pew!".

Still, it was a better answer than the 2 of you who thought that really big ray-guns make no noise at all. Ha! I scoff at your pseudo-intellectual wrong-headedness! If it made no noise at all, how would stuff get blowed up by it? The scientists would have to add a thing to make a noise so it could zap people, wouldn't they? And then it would make a noise. So you're wrong.

Three of you thought that a really big ray-gun would go "Brrrdoo! Brrrdoo!" and you're close to the mark but not quite there. A ray-gun that it takes two hands to use would go "Brrrdoo! Brrrdoo!" but it's not really big, is it?

No, a really big ray-gun would have to be mounted on a tank or a plane or a deaf-star or something like that. And it would definitely go "Freem!" - and it would only do it once because buddy when you get hit by that thing you're lying down straight away so they don't do it again. Oh yeah.

So if you picked "Freem!" then give yourself a pat on the back. Well done.

If you picked "Brrrdoo! Brrrdoo!" then set your shoulders back and pledge to do better next time - you have potential.

If you chose "Pew pew pew!" then bite your arm until it leaves teeth-marks. You've got a lot to learn.

And if you chose "No noise at all", you know where the door is. Get out.

Brachiating

Sometimes I hate studying. Sometimes it all just builds up and I start to fantasize about when I used to work in the public service and got paid to sit on my backside and eat cake.

Fortunately, today is not one of those days. Today I am elated because I've been learning all sorts of crazy trivia stuff. Most particularly, I learned today that the plural form of biceps is bicipites (pronounced bi-sip-it-teez). This is awesome! For the rest of my life I'm going to able to annoy the hell out of people by correcting their incorrect usage of biceps as a plural noun.

For example, if someone were to say to me, "Did you see Gary Hall Jr. on telly? He said he was going to smash the Australian relay team like guitars, and then he kissed his biceps!" - I would be able to say, "Yes I did see that, and I think you'll find that he kissed both his bicipites, not just one!" - and the person would say, "Piss off you idiot" - and I would laugh and strut and ask if they wanted to play Scrabble against me and laugh again when they fearfully declined.

In fact, if I was going to be really annoying I'd ask them to clarify if they were talking about Gary Hall Jr's bicipites brachii or his bicipites femoris. Seeing him kiss the latter would be quite a sight. (There's another "don't know your arse from your elbow" joke lurking in there somewhere - can anybody come up with a setup?)

The one drawback, of course, is that the people who like to talk most about arm muscles are people whose arm muscles are somewhat larger than mine and would probably make me eat those Scrabble tiles one by one. Oh well.

蛋挞

Yum cha yesterday! Awesome! Went to place up the snooty end of Greenhill road. The food was good and the prices were cheap (for Adelaide).

Once of my favourites at yum cha is the little egg custard tarts: dan tart (pronounced like dahn tart with a low tone I think). Anyway, yesterday was a bit tragic because as the plate was being passed to me, my dan tart slipped off and fell directly into my tea cup. Bummer. Luckily my Smaller Half took pity on me and I got half of hers.

The great thing about dan tart is not only are they delicious but there's a great song I made up (well, adapted) that you can sing about them, which I sing in the car every time we are going to yum cha to help us get in the mood. If you know the song "Downtown" by Petula Clark (linky) then it's easy. You just sing that song but replace every instance of the word "downtown" with "dan tart".

When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go - dan tart!
When you've got worries all the noise and the noise and the hurry seems to help, I know - dan tart!

Endocrine strikes back

One of the horrible things about studying hard for upcoming exams (so I've been told - ha ha) is that you get this awful feeling that the information that you're forcing into your mind is inexorably forcing out stuff that was previously in there.

My Smaller Half was sitting in with an endocrinologist a day or two ago, so of course over dinner we chatted about all things endocrinologistish. Since I happened to have passed my endocrinology exam back in April, I was keen to strut my stuff and show her how much I know. So naturally when she mentioned that there were a lot of patients coming in with hyperthyroidism I got excited and did an infodump. Unfortunately I basically ended up babbling like an idiot.

PTR
Oh! Oh! Did anyone have that thing? Where your skin goes a funny colour?

Smaller Half
What??

PTR
You know! With the hormone! You know! Preproopiomelanocortin! It gets cleaved! Into melanocyte stimulating hormone and the other one. C! C!

Smaller Half
What??

PTR
C! It's got a C in it! It controls the thyroid!

Smaller Half
TSH?

PTR
Yeah that's it! No wait, I'm confused.

Smaller Half
I think you mean Addison's disease. That's your adrenal glands, not your thyroid.

PTR
Oh.

Smaller Half
If I were you I wouldn't say that kind of stuff in front of the consultants next year.

I find it pretty depressing that the only thing I could remember was that piece of trivia about preproopiomelanocortin - a totally useless piece of knowledge which I got wrong anyhow.