First and last lines for Nothing to Envy

First:

If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Last:

It is a North Korean phenomenon that many have observed. For lack of chairs or benches, the people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in the market. They stare straight ahead as though they are waiting-for a tram, maybe, or a passing car? A friend of relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just waiting for something to change.

Even more about synesthesia

I heard the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on The Leonard Lopate Show talking about his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain. Which sounds like a must read. The subject of synesthesia came up, as did mirror neurons and phantom limbs and some other stuff.

Color blindness is a condition affecting the retina. They have done research on people who are color blind and have synesthesia and find they can provoke images of colors they have never seen by showing them numbers.

As I had written before, synesthesia originates because of unusual wiring in the fusiform gyrus region of the temporal lobe. The most common form is grapheme-color synesthesia, the kind where numbers and letters get associated with colors. The fusiform gyrus is also associated with determining shapes so this makes sense. A friend of mine has this form of synesthesia, although he says he didn't realize until he got married that this wasn't the way everyone saw numbers.

Although only about 1 in 50 people exhibit this trait, about 1 in 8 artists and novelists have it. It brings up interesting ideas about how art evolved so early in our species (when leisure time wasn't plentiful.)

They also still don't know how exactly a clump of neurons became the human brain and all that that entails. Ramachandran said it's a mystery (the kind that makes scientists giddy.) He also talked about Chomsky's theories of the brain, which I only know in relation to language. That is, Chomsky believes the brain is born innately wired for language (the way pidgin evolves into creole is cited as one proof of this.) I guess I need to read to book to see what he was talking about but he did say that perhaps when a billion neurons are compressed into a small space, unpredictable things-like making a brain-will happen. That's a cool idea.

What I've learned from Nothing to Envy thus far

First of all, Barbara Demick can write her ass off. Which is good because otherwise this book would be too bleak to finish (the one chapter about the famine-Wandering Swallows-oh my God I wish I hadn't read page 164.) It's interesting to compare between her and Sonia Shah, who wrote the book I just finished, The Fever, about malaria. Both well researched and interesting topics. Demick is clearly the better writer though and elevates the material literary fiction levels. It's interesting to complement non-fiction by saying it reads like fiction but I've noticed I'm not the only one who makes that comparison. That's why Capote invented the genre of literary non-fiction after all.

The book was written in 2010 but mainly deals with the famine of the 90's. All of the main characters, who all defected to South Korea, are from Chongjin. Demick picked it first to focus on one part of the country in detail. And also because Pyongyang is a city reserved for party faithful and showcase North Koreans (one character says her neighbors were kicked out of the capital because their son has dwarfism.) Pyongyang is also likely to be the only city in the DPRK that Westerners have seen, and few at that-excepting some border towns where South Koreans are allowed in more peaceful times to flow in and out of a bit easier. Hyundai plays an interesting role in that, btw.

Journalists are highly respected because they are the party mouthpieces. This also puts them in the unique position of actually seeing some of the unexpurgated news from the outside, which they can't of course report. But they have to filter it to report only the bad stories from the rest of the world. Doctors are respected but, at the time of the novel at least, not that well paid and expected to gather their own medicinal herbs in the springtime. As in, they take a month or more off to harvest herbs from the countryside. As the economic crisis turned into an energy crisis and the lights went off in the whole country, the factories weren't able to produce drugs and these herbs became more important.


When Kim Il-Song died in July, 1994, the famine was already starting. People stood in mourning lines sometimes two or three times in a row to get the rice cakes they were handing out. There are videos on YouTube of the hysteria. Some of it was genuine and some of it was just due to the psychological nature of hysteria being contagious. But it was also apparent that the inminban (the neighborhood Party spies) were watching to make sure people were mourning sufficiently. The people Demick interviewed described how it became a contest to see who could look the most grief-stricken. One defector who was a kindergarten teacher said she thought one of her students was approaching hysteria and then realized she was spitting on her hands and wiping her face because her mother had told her she was a bad person if she didn't cry.





North Korea is fucked up, yo. When is someone going to pull a Romanov style assassination on that family?

They also reconfigured the calendars a few years after Kim-Il Song's death. Now they use some jive shit called the Juche Calendar. Year 1 is the year 1912 when Kim-Il Song was born. The Gregorian calendar is still used for dates prior to 1912. No wonder South Korea is not ecstatic about the notion of re-unification. How many orders of magnitude worse would this be than the German re-unification?

However, South Korea does have a policy that all North Koreans are South Korean citizens so if you defect, you are a South Korean de facto. However, China doesn't want refugees flooding over their border (and apparently they have been known to catch them and send them back to certain death if found) so you can't defect to China and then request asylum at a South Korean embassy. The Chinese border is of course easier to cross than the DMZ.

Speaking of Juche (the seriously misguided North Korean notion of superiority and self-reliance), some scientist there invented a fabric called Vinalon which is also called the Juche fiber. Like everything in the DPRK, it is shabby and suicidally depressing. It's some cheap shiny fabric that doesn't hold color well so most of the time you will see it in black or gray. If you live above the 38th parallel, you probably have a wardrobe-full of this stiff, uncomfortable, dreary cloth. How comfortable could pants or sheets made from anthracite coal and limestone be?

(apparently in Europe you can buy pet towels made from it.)

During the famine, it was reported that Kim Jong-Il was eating meals of simple potatoes. This isn't true. He has notoriously gourmet tastes and was eating imported lobster and shit. Meanwhile, his subjects were literally combing thru animal shit trying to find some undigested plant material. Nice.

What was good about the famine is that it presented people who were able to survive it with unprecedented freedom to move about a country where normally travel permits are required to go anywhere. This in a country where you had to have a permit to travel and had to inform the local inminban where they were staying. You needed a permit to stay in a motel (and woe betide the single woman travelling alone.) It kind of reminded me of my favorite book that I read for my contemporary Arab literature class, The Story of Zahra by Hanan Al-Shaykh. The Lebanese Civil War brought similar freedom to Zahra, a young unattractive woman from a repressive family in Beirut. There can be moments of exhilarating liberty in the utter collapse of society.

Finally, as long as I'm speaking of shit--North Korea was short of fertilizer in the 90's (maybe they still are) so it was every family's job to collect "night soil" and bring it to a collection center for credits. Night soil is human shit someone had to collect from the toilet that they used to fertilize the crops. How does everyone not have cholera? Anyways, yeah. Gross. I liked how Mrs. Song's daughter got around it though. She would go to the collection center and steal a bucket (because, as the author reasoned, who would guard a warehouse full of buckets of poo?) and then present it for the food credit.

Philomathia: Spartans!

I was listening to a podcast about the story of the Battle of Marathon which got me thinking about Sparta (and Gerard Butler in the days before he starred in wanker romantic "comedies" about vibrating panties. So read the title of this post in a testosterone-laden Scottish accent.)

But first, the Battle of Marathon took place in 490 BC between the Greeks, specifically the Athenians, and Persians of course. John Stuart Mill said it was a more important battle to British history than the Battle of Hastings (the Brits do love their classical Greek history and Latin grammar.) The runner story (his name was Pheidippides) is probably apocryphal but at least he got his name on an Atlanta running store for it.

But what I didn't know is that the whole Battle took place because the Athenians had gone to Darius I in 507 and asked him to become their ally against Sparta. Darius accepted but apparently considered himself the ruler over Athens instead which was kind of a drag so by 499 the Athenians in Asia Minor has burned Darius' capital there, Sardis. It just took the Persians a few years to get around to attacking Greece because of problems in Egypt and by that time leadership had passed from Darius I to Xerxes. Kind of fitting I suppose that the Spartans ended up not helping in the Marathon battle.

(and yes, I reference 300 in the title of this post which is actually the Battle of Thermopylae which was 10 years and force mulipliers later.)

Also, Marathon means "fennel" in Greek. It was a field of fennel so at least the battle smelled good. And fennel "seeds" are apparently actually fruit. And, someone who loves Spartan culture can be called a laconophile.

Actually, the point of all this is I was wondering what became of Sparta? Apparently, it still exists but it is called Sparti. Unlike Athens, it seems to have faded into relative obscurity. Only about 14,000 live in the town itself. They have a museum if there is a laconophile (or Frank Miller fan) in your life. It boasts this claim to fame:

The Museum of Ancient Sparta is the only museum built in Greece between 1874 and 1876 by architect G. Katsaros.

Well, that's....specific. 


And one more note on the philomathia versus epistemophilia. What's the difference? I hadn't really seen the word philomath before so, there's that. Until that is, I read the Dark Horse anthology of Archie comics firsts (I just wish Katy Keene, Sabrina and Josie weren't in separate volumes.) Archie at one point is being hazed by a group called the Philomathians, which is also one of the first appearances of Reggie. Cmon, I can point to being inspired by an Archie comic? No contest. 

First and last lines for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Better late than obsessing about not blogging them until the end of days never.

First:

They're out there.

Last:

I been away a long time.

More I learned from The Fever

Where were we?

Perhaps the discovery that mosquitos spread malaria. For years it was presumed that swamp gas and miasmas caused malaria (hence, of course, its name.) In 1880, a French surgeon stationed in Algeria named Alphonse Laveran first saw Plasmodium in action on a blood slide, seemingly by a random accident of timing. He prepared an infected blood slide and wandered off for 15 or so minutes. In this time the blood had cooled, tricking the parasite into thinking it had returned to an Anopheles's body. The males had sprouted flagella and were looking for wimmen and were squiggling about.

Around the same time, a Scottish physician named Patrick Manson stationed in China had figured out that a type of disgusting worm parasite called filariasis was transmitted by mosquitoes, although he was fairly wrong about a number of things (he thought mosquitoes only bit once in their lives and that the disease was caused by drinking water containing the bodies of contaminated mosquitoes.)  He teamed up with a doctor in the Indian Medical Service named Ronald Ross who apparently was a tool and kind of an idiot. At least, the author thinks so:

Ronald Ross was like many other docs in the British Raj's Indian Medical Service. He professed no particular interest in public health or medicine, or even India, and wasn't especially accomplished.

And his personal correspondence seems to bear out the author's opinions. With disdain for both victims of malaria and naturalists who would know about their vector candidate, he set about trying to prove Manson's theories in India but mainly succeeded in making all the locals distrust and avoid him, for good reason. It was really two Italians who discovered the correct link.

The builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand De Lesseps, had tried to build a canal in Panama too (note: where is the date? The author only says they abandoned the effort in 1889. Sloppy, sloppy.) He wanted to protect his workers from the scourges of yellow fever and malaria and invested money in building hospitals with watered gardens and hospital beds with legs that sat in buckets of water to prevent spiders and ants from getting into the patients' linens. Instead, he of course created an even more perfect mosquito habitat and the project was abandoned and his company went bankrupt. Poor dude. He lost his wife and child due to malaria while building the Suez Canal.

Finally of course the Panama Canal was built to the Americans with the help of an Army surgeon named Gorgas. The author does not think as highly of him as Wikipedia does, particularly with his (well, the whole US Government's) racist treatment of non-white canal laborers. BTW, the Panama Canal is how malaria was introduced to Barbados as the infected workers brought it home.

What I've learned so far from The Fever

I've already written about Plasmodium's origins as a protozoan. It started in Africa (of course) and went through several mutations. It evolved from Plasmodium to P. malariae. It wasn't very efficient because it took so long to do its development inside of the Anopheles (on the plus side, it could lie dormant inside a human body for decades as well just waiting for the right mosquito to bite.)

P. malariae  is still around by the way and is referred to as the "benign malaria" or "quartan malaria." Shah refers to quartan fever through the book but never explains what it means. That means the fevers occur at 3-day intervals as opposed to tertian fever, which is the 2-day interval caused by other forms of Plasmodium.

It eventually mutated into a more successful form, P. vivax, that is also still around today. That version could make the round trip from sporozoite to gametocyte in the victim's body within 3 days so it would be ready to spread as soon as 3 days after the victim was bitten. P. vivax was foiled for a while by a human genetic mutation now known as Duffy cells-they are the absence of proteins on the red blood cell's surface which means the parasite can't grab hold. Don't get too excited though because this mutation isn't universally available-Caucasians and Asians generally don't have it. This mutation makes no functional difference to the humans who have it, unlike a later mutation. Which brings me to...

The parasite mutated again into P. falciparum (pronounced fal-SIP-ar-um) which could bypass the Duffy cell mutation and was much more successful at its hemoglobin munching and immune cell evasion. The sickle cell mutation is in response to this form of Plasmodium.

Quinine was known as an antidote for centuries and was guarded as a secret by the Spanish (and that now explains why they were more successful than that ill-fated Scottish colony at Darien in Panama.) It comes from the bark of the cinchona tree which is indigenous to the Andes. Kind of curious that the cure for an African protozoan would be found in South America. How old is this thing? Does it date back to when these continents were attached?

(Holy shit. I just found the most amazing site with a map of the Pangea breakup. If somehow the tree and the parasite are related, that would mean it's as old as the Jurassic period at least, so ~ 130 million years.)

So, quinine. It did start to catch on but various attempts to transplant it and cultivate it elsewhere were met with Spanish resistance and difficulties in cultivation. The Dutch finally got a quinine-rich variety growing in their colony on Java after much trial and error. The problem was they cornered the market and were charging ridiculous prices. The US tried to sue them for antitrust violations in the 1930's but the Dutch Kina Bureau didn't give a shit. What finally broke their monopoly was WWII. The Germans seizes the Netherlands while the Japanese seized Java. This led to the invention of chloroquine (and the less successful quinacrine which apparently turns your skin yellow and can cause psychosis. It is still being used in some cases so try not to catch Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease or eat poo, like my roommate did in Syria.)

Some famous people who died of malaria include Alexander the Great (probably),  Genghis Khan (ditto), Lord Byron and 4 popes within 100 years in the Middle Ages. Oliver Cromwell died of it in 1652 although the quinine remedy was known-due to the remedy being advocated by Jesuits, he thought it was some kind of Catholic plot and died which is some beautiful karma at work. Oddly enough, his successor Charles II died of malaria too in 1685 (wikipedia says kidney failure but Shah's book is footnoted.) Charles actually did take the cinchona bark remedy but it wasn't until 1820 that two French chemists (Pelletier and Caventou) isolated the compound and figured out how to extract it. Depending on the age or species of cinchona bark you select to munch upon, you might get a mouth full of splinters and no quinine.

There was a statue in France commemorating Pelletier and Caventou's achievement but the asshole Nazis melted it down to make munitions during the War.

Philomathia: malaria and my third world disease story

I'm reading a book about malaria and it's pretty interesting. I like this micro-history trend. The pathogen is eukaryotic and started out probably as a protozoan floating in an African pond and at some point decided to hitch a ride on mosquito larvae, Anopheles in particular as only their physiology seems to support it and then only about 60 something out of the over 200 species of Anopheles. My rating of the book is going to be influenced by how well these questions are answered:

• When was prophylaxis developed and how does it work? Update: chapter 5
• How did the Carolinas become habitable? Apparently, and not surprisingly, they were hotbeds of malaria in colonial days to the point where Germans said it was impossible to live there but it seems certainly by civil war times they had lots of residents.
• Is she going to talk about the new work on malaria vaccines? Update: Yes, chapter 7.
• I'd like to know why the Scottish colony on Panama got its ass whipped but the Spaniards had enough mojo left to attack it. I know that one won't be answered as she has already told the story. But, the Spanish were sick too. Is it shear numbers? Update: resolved in the chapter on quinine. The Spanish tried to keep that native remedy quiet.
• Geographical imprecision makes me fucking insane. You can't introduce a story about the British in West Africa and not even mention the country. There are lots of countries formerly colonized by lots of greedy Europeans in West Africa. The one she is talking about, I believe, is Sierra Leone since she mentions Freetown. On an unrelated note, of course a site about the former British Empire would have a .uk URL.

When I went to Syria, I opted to take an anti-malarial even though it's not an issue in Damascus but it is up near Aleppo. I might have wanted to go to Aleppo (and I had the chance and didn't and that was regrettable.) But more to the point, I did NOT want to get sick over there. I think I took Chloroquine-yep, I just looked it up and those bright pinkish purple pills look familiar. I had to take it once a week for every week I was there or something like that. It was especially cool to take it as I remembered it being a plot point in a MASH episode.

I also took an oral vaccine for typhoid (I always get this mixed up with typhus--typhoid is the one that is a type of Salmonella.) And the Hepatitis A vaccine. And, I got sick anyways with some kind of diarrhea from Hell which I had for at least half my time in country. Know what it's like to shit your pants in 110 degree heat miles from a flush toilet? I do! My poor roommate though had amoebic dysentery, although we didn't know that till we got back home and she went to her doctor. Apparently you keep that variety forever, like fruitcake. I had to take her to the hospital in the middle of the night where she was misdiagnosed as having an upset stomach and told to eat boiled potatoes (she could barely walk because the cramps were so bad so I was skeptical at the time. What was cool though is our Yemeni housemate insisted on coming with us and hailed a cabdriver he knew to take us to the hospital.)

Anyways, I got sick but I didn't get Hep A or Typhoid. Now, what struck me as curious (if not brain damaged) is there was a woman in our group who wasn't from OSU but was studying Arabic on her own from Texas. She was some kind of religious whatever. Nice lady though. Her independent study really showed when she spoke Arabic. Know what Arabic with a thick Texas accent sounds like? I do! We were discussing our medical preparations for the trip one day and she said she went to some kind of naturopath (alarm bells going off yet?) who advised her NOT to get the Hepatitis A vaccine because there were problems with it. I was sick and hot and sleep deprived and covered with dust most of the time which made me much less likely to hold my tongue so I said, "Really? Cause I have a problem getting fucking Hepatitis in a third world country." As far as I know, she didn't get sick. Although she did suffer some kind of bedbug or flea attack at the house she was staying at.

My poor roommate had such a germ fetish before we went to Syria. She wouldn't eat off of her plate if you grabbed food off of it (not that I did that personally but our male classmates would do it just to see her reaction.) When she found out she had dysentery, she called me and informed me she had "ate poop." And, yeah she kinda did. But I probably did too.

Some great lines from Cuckoo's nest

Not really a great line in and of itself but in context this observation at the end of Part I where the patients defy Big Nurse in the small way that they can by sitting around a dead TV screen not watching the World Series is so intensely liberating:

If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and reciminations, they'd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.

And Chief's reflection on the danger of sticking your neck out minutes later:

I'm just getting the full force of the dangers we let ourselves in for when we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog. 

One of the Acutes is named Harding and there are suggestions that he might be homosexual. Or just a feminine guy. And has a cruel wife. She comes to visit one day when the patients are in the library and he asks McMurphy afterwards what he thinks:
"Hell's bells, Harding!" Mc Murphy yells suddenly....."All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. I know what you want me to think; you want me to feel sorry for you, to think she's a real bitch. Well you didn't make her feel like any queen either. Well, screw you and 'what do you think?' "

Chief Bromden's observation about McMurphy on the fishing trip:

Maybe he couldn't understand why we weren't able to laugh yet, but he knew you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard at pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn't able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach.

And Harding's on their discovering, with McMurphy's help, the potential for intimidation the perception of mental illness bestows:

"Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the mind reel, doesn't it? Food for thought there."

On the laughing miracle that happened on the fishing trip:

While McMurphy laughs....Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. he knows there's a painful side...but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

It started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them-and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself and I could look down and see myself and the rest of the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds, see McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people, and watch them, us, swinging a laughter than rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave.

And this bit of foreshadowing (along with the men being unable to stand up to the louts at the dock without McMurphy right beside them) that kind of makes me wish the book ends at Part III:

Then-as he was talking-a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do...

Chief's last moments with McMurphy:
I looked at McMurphy out of the corner of my eye, trying not to be obvious about it. He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round-in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. all you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out any more and somebody else had to take your place.

Philomathia: brain stuff

So, my Dictionary.com word of the day the other day was philomath: a lover of learning. It came with a great quote from Aldous Huxley, "It is precisely for the philomaths that universities ought to cater." And, yeah.

I was listening to a story on Science Friday a few weeks ago about a woman who didn't experience fear due to lesions on her amygdala. I guess Nature reported on the story years ago saying she couldn't recognize the facial expression of fear but that's only the tip of the iceberg. 

The Changing World did a series on the mysteries of the brain in December which I'm just now getting around to listening to. They discussed among other things how the brain combines sensory information together without being picky about where it comes from, which is why when you watch a movie in a theatre you think the words are emanating from the screen. And how our sensory input can mislead us according to one researcher who is working on the connection between taste and our other senses. He tricked a group of oenophiles (in fact the more people knew about wine, the more easier they were fooled) by taking a white wine and coloring it red. The wine experts started smelling chocolate and tobacco notes that they didn't smell when the wine was white. And how closely related hearing and taste are, which is kind of freaky. Our experience of how stale a potato chip is as much about mouth feel as about the crunch sound.

What was most interesting though is their discussion of synesthesia, which kind of fascinates me anyways. They spoke to a BBC presenter that had it. A doctor who is studying it believes this condition emanates from a part of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus. I knew Kandinsky (the founder of the Blue Rider) was believed to have synesthesia but apparently Nabokov had it as well. This would be especially useful for a writer as metaphor and synesthesia appear to be closely related. This all makes me think of one of my favorite studies, the bouba/kiki effect. It's no coincidence that there are certain phonological similarities in world languages, such as the word for mother frequently starting with or containing the "m" sound. And the words for small things often containing the "ee" sound (like "tiny" or "little" in English versus "kaleel" in Arabic, for example.)

I switched over to the Trebuchet font because it's more pleasing and round and friendly to my eyes. However, if I were to make my choice based on logic rather than aethetics, I should choose an less visually pleasing font according to recent research that ugly fonts increase the reader's data retention. So, this would have been a better choice.

First thoughts on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I despair that I will not finish this before book club next week. However, I am enjoying it after having some trouble getting started. The voice of Bromden takes some getting used to. I think I reach the boundaries of my intellect (or of my Asperger's) when I try to interpret an author's meaning and choices. It's kind of thrilling in a solipsistic way to find a well-defined boundary to such a thing. Anyways, I can see the Ken Kesey is making a specific and conscious artistic choice to narrate the story through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic (?) although one review I read said it did a disservice to Chief Bromden to frame him in psychiatric trappings. What I can't figure is why he made this choice.

It's also impossible to read this without thinking about the movie. At any rate, I'm enjoying the very visual prose. The care Kesey takes to describe the calluses on McMurphy's palms or Bromden's visit to a cotton gin when he was a teenager. Kesey spends a lot of time actually describing hands I notice. It makes me think about the non-fiction writer Richard Preston. In his preface to Panic in Level 4, he says he always asks the person he is writing about if he can see their hands. For a doctor at USAMRID, he was able to visualize and empathize with her story about cutting her hands in the morning in her kitchen, going to work on a Level 4 autopsy, and cutting her glove with a dirty scalpel. She ran through decontamination fearing she had broken the skin and infected herself with an unspecified hemorrhagic fever. It turned out the blood in her internal glove was where her cut had reopened.

Preston said hands were a way he learned about the subject. Not that that's what Kesey is doing, it's just how I'm perceiving it.

I loved this line from McMurphy which is fine advice for life:

"You ever been kneed in the nuts in a brawl, buddy? Stops you cold, don't it? There's nothing worse. It makes you sick, it saps every bit of strength you got. If you're up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, than watch for his knee, he's gonna go for your vitals."

Ice storms-even less fun that the depressing Rick Moody novel

(that was a great book and movie. Although the movie felt at times like watching an imaginary documentary about my parents. Sigourney Weaver even looks and acts just like my Mother. That part where she quoted Margaret Mead was a very weird moment for me. Anyways...)

So, we had an ice storm last week. I got what was probably a concussion when I slipped and fell on the ice. I gather that because my vision was blurry for a few hours and I was kind of confused. On the bright side, it was kind of peaceful.

Anyways, I can write about concussions and whiplash all day (who couldn't, really) but what I wanted to discuss was ice storms. I was curious about what causes this shit-tastic phenomenon. Apparently, the cause is a layer of warm air trapped between two layers of cold air which causes snow to melt and then rapidly re-freeze on its way down. This other website says you also need near 100% humidity.

The thickest ice storm on record was in Idaho in 1961, where they recorded 8 inches. I knew there was a reason I didn't want to live in Idaho (although the Mormons are reason enough.) I can't find exact numbers but all of the local sites say we should have gotten 1/2 to 1".

This site is written for kids but has some good info nevertheless.

It could have been worse. The Northeast got it bad. And Chicago, as usual. And I didn't lose power like a lot of people here. Wintertime sucks dick, to paraphrase Louisa May Alcott.

Sad news for BBC World Service

I listened to the latest episode of The World in Words and the BBC World Service is being cut. 5 languages are being eliminated and it looks like the Balkans are being hit particularly hard: Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian along with Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean. Several more including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Russian will be internet only. The one that makes the most sense is they are greatly reducing their presence on shortwave, except for in Africa which shows the most use. The World Service is not only the single impartial news source for parts of the world (well, there's still Voice of America but they've been hit by cuts too and aren't as good, although it was naturally a BBC spokesperson who said this. But I think they are right), but they represent an important source of soft power for Britain.

Finally, some are concerned about what world government could move in to fill the vacuum left in the BBC's wake. The names floated were Iran, Russia, and China who, now that you mention it not surprisingly, have been moving to expand their broadcasts in other languages. They have a Swahili station that is widely listened to in Kenya. The problems with all of these of course is all of them are state mouthpieces. Iran would easily be the most egregious of the three.

There's some grim belt tightening going on in Britain currently. The Guardian Science Weekly podcast has been concerned about the freeze on science funding in the UK and the future of the Royal Society's book prize for science writing. The shortlist for last year can be found here. My favorite based purely on titles is We Need to Talk About Kelvin.

On a completely different topic (but it does concern beloved old England and science), I found a copy of Ken Russell's trippy should-have-been camp classic The Lair of the White Worm for a few bucks and bought it. I always preferred Ken Russell to Nicholas Roeg, the other director that springs to mind when discussing weird British filmmakers of the 70's and 80's. Wikipedia tells me among other things that Ken is 87 years old now and that Crimes of Passion was considered an all-around failure which is news to me. I think that movie is awesomely hilarious ("What are you going to do? Fuck somebody to death?" "Only the right girl." RIP, Tony Perkins.)

Anyways, White Worm. Roman snake gods, a classic performance by Amanda Donahoe, a young Hugh Grant, that chick from Dynasty being nearly violated by a wooden ceremonial dildo (that looked a lot like Tony Perkins' pointy tipped death vibrator in Crimes of Passion come to think of it), blasphemy. Good times. However, I blanched at the scene where the archeologist uncovers the skull of the white worm at a Roman dig site. His girlfriend asked, "Oh, the Romans didn't have pet dinosaurs?" "No," he says, "they were 25 million years apart." 25??? Try 65 million, minimum. Oh, Ken. I know the British school system is superior to ours. Yes, it's a stupid thing to get hung up on but it is still bugging me. At least he didn't say 6000 years ago. That seems to be almost entirely American idiocy thus far.

Finally, timelines. They are important. I always struggle with some of the early man dates. I got a book from the library called Science ASAP by Alan Axelrod that I think I'll have to end up owning. His section on the Bronze and Iron Ages is riveting. By 5000 BC, people were wearing copper ore ornaments. It took them 1000 years to figure out how to smelt copper ore. But some copper was harder than others and some was too soft to do anything practical with. We now know of course this was due to the impurities in the different samples. It took them another 1000 years, ~3000 BC, to figure out that smelting copper and tin together yielded the much tougher alloy bronze and the Bronze Age began.

They knew that there was a still tougher material, iron, but the only easily obtainable source of it was in meteorites (these were the only rocks where iron was not mixed with non-metallic substances and they were somewhat rare.) The problem was wood fires weren't sufficiently hot to free  iron from ore until ~1500 BC when the Hittites invented charcoal by burning wood in a low oxygen environment. Result: no flame but a much hotter fire. And voila.

This process never yielded a product as good as that found in those rare ferrous meteorites though. The smelting process was perfected over a few hundred years to cause the carbon from the fire to combine with the iron until carbonized steel was born ~1000 BC at the advent of the Iron Age. There was a great episode of Nova about the making of Samurai swords which explains some of this.

It's kind of amazing this all happened over millennia. It's more amazing because like many scientific discoveries, it likely resulted from someone paying attention during a happy accident.

Epistemophilia: Founding neologists

I was listening to an episode of PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge on the subject of linguistics. They interviewed Patricia O'Connor (the word lady that is always on WNYC.) She said several of the founding fathers were big neologists. Washington gave us hatchet man (although he meant it literally), bakery, indoors, off-duty, paroled and nondiscrimination. Jefferson gave us pedicure and monotonously and he loved creating new words so much he coined the term neologism. Or rather, Washington and Jefferson were at least the first recorded users of those words. Lincoln first used the word relocate and coined the phrase "point well taken." Nice to know they were carrying on in the tradition of Milton and Shakespeare.

She also said what Americans think of as the British accent is a fairly recent development. She theorizes it came about after the Revolutionary War, including that posh Oxbridge accent that Americans all feel salivate over.  The Brits also love to criticize us for stinking up the language but American English actually preserves some elements that British English didn't, like the subjunctive mood (example: "I suggest he get a job" versus "I suggest he gets a job.")

They also had a man named Dan Everett on who started out as a missionary in the Amazon Jungle and ended up studying their language. The tribe, called the Piraha, speaks a tonal language which is notoriously difficult for Westerners to get a handle on. He suggested whistling the words to hear the tonal vowel differences which is an excellent idea actually. What I liked best about him though is he decided he would rather study their language and culture rather than stick them in Church singing "Jesus Loves Me" and looking for Satan under their beds. Well done.

First and last lines What's Eating Gilbert Grape

First:

Standing with my brother Arnie on the edge of town has become a yearly ritual.

Last:

The sirens fill the air, the walls in Momma's room fall down in flames, and Amy says, "Yes, Arnie, look at the lights."

Final thoughts on What's Eating Gilbert Grape

I love the movie, it's one of my favorites. The book...I liked and parts were really funny but it's not the same as the movie and maybe I did want the two to be more similar. The Mamma character isn't near as likable and when you are so fat that you are virtually immobile and not particularly useful, you had better be a charming motherfucker, not some stinky lump who bangs on the table demanding their whole box of cereal and package of Kools be brought to them for breakfast. There are extra siblings-Larry and Janice-who flew the coop and send money home but visit rarely. There are also a few plot threads that were dropped from the movie: a local boy who became a huge celebrity for being a Des Moines newscaster whom Gilbert naturally hates, Gilbert's school being burned down after being closed for several years, and Gilbert's grade school teacher who humiliated him on the same day his dad hung himself dying. Arnie is still Arnie, although he has the addition of a glass eye caused by a dartboard accident that will make my eye sockets ache to recount. The Becky character is different-and 15. Gilbert is 24. Uhm, ick. Also, the events surrounding Mr. Carver's demise were condensed and made much more sense in the movie. Mr. Carver asks Gilbert to come over and show his kids that a trampoline is fun? Don't really get it.

(I did like Mrs. Carver leaving him the trampoline. You can see it being used in the movie at Arnie's party but they never explain how it got there.)

Gilbert is more like Holden Caulfield than the movie character. Maybe that is why I don't quite click with this book as I'm one of maybe ten people (pearl clutchers excepted) who didn't love Catcher in the Rye. Gilbert is a miserable stoical character who speaks little which is just as well since most of what he would say is insulting. He does like his boss Mr. Lamson and his sister Amy. More than anything, he deplores emotion and hasn't cried since his father hung himself. He meets Becky and has a nightmare that this girl will make him cry. And she does eventually. I get it understand why people would love this book, I just didn't myself.

Here are a few snippets of Gilbert's musings:

I'm staring at her trying to decide the most discrete way to murder.

If Amy's so worried about the floor, why did she back Momma an entire meat loaf?

I dream about pretty people and fast cars, and I dream I'm still me but my family is someone else. I dream I'm still me.

Momma says a person shows their gratitude by action, not by words. So I guess that means she thanks me by smoking every cigarette in every pack.

Momma stops, her big tongue pushes out of her mouth like on the National Geographic specials when a whale rises out of the water for air.

All I know is that Arnie's big eighteenth birthday is going to be something else. And if Momma hasn't fallen through the floor and if Arnie hasn't died in his sleep and if Ellen isn't pregnant and if the other Grapes haven't gone further off the edge, maybe, maybe we'll be okay.

I should thank Lance for giving Arnie the next-president award. But I make a point to not say thanks.

I find Mr. Carver in his wife's station wagon, rolling down his window in a panic, shouting, "Gilbert! Gilbert! Gilbert!" The moment has finally come. Mrs. Carver has told him everything and he has come to remove my genitalia with a hacksaw.

(on newly widowed Mrs. Carver)

Her fingers are afraid. This is more interesting than whether she's a murderess. To me, the man deserved death but perhaps a more violent, gruesome end would have been more appropriate.

"Everything is great," I say. "Everything is peachy. I've got a mother who would eat her arm is she had enough barbecue sauce, a dorkass older brother and a wicked sister who got out of this town, a little bitch of a sister who very likely made love to Jesus last night, an ever-fattening older sister who deserves a decent man, and a retard brother who, we have reason to believe, has gone into hiding and is once again terrified of water."