Ce la vie

June 30, 2008 | Comments (2) | Permalink

Fiona emailed me with a new comedy sketch she's been working on, which is brilliant as usual (when oh when will someone give Jamz Foods corp. inc. a huge grant so we can take time off being a professor and an ER doctor and finally film the greatest sketch comedy show the world has ever known?? Note: we have never applied for a grant of any kind). She is also apparently writing an essay in order to apply for some travel funds for a toxicology conference she wants to go to (and I thought MY life was interesting!). Her essay includes this gem:

"Last summer I found myself hiking along a rocky beach on an island off the western coast of Australia where hundreds of blue bottles had washed ashore. Cradling a delicate, bright blue air-filled bladder between my fingers, I was able to contemplate this strange creature not as simply the curious remnant of a Portuguese Man O' War, but as a colony of zooids with specialized nematocysts that release multiple high molecular weight polypeptides, altering membrane ion transport and resulting in cytotoxicity, neurotoxicity, and sometimes cardiotoxicity in its unsuspecting human victims."

There is really nothing like Fiona. If you're ever in the greater Minneapolis area and you have some sort of traumatic medical emergency, hopefully you'll get to meet her. The world of toxicology has no idea what's about to hit it.

Last night we were trying to go to sleep but there was this weird noise on the patio underneath the bedroom window. It sounded like someone was taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in. I realize that this is a very specific sound, but it is exactly what it sounded like. "It sounds like someone's taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in," I said to Andrew.

"No," he said, "it sounds more like CDs."
"No, it's way too clunky and heavy to be CDs. It has to be VHS tapes."
"Why would someone be taking VHS tapes in and out of their cases?"
"I don't know, but that's exactly what it sounds like."
"No, hear that? That's a jewel case."
"No, that's one of those weird plastic VHS cases that snaps shut."

He got up and looked out the window.

"Well," he said, "guess what it was."
"VHS tapes."
"Yes."

The human ear, specifically mine, is a wonder of nature. But then I became sad, thinking of how my children will be unable to identify the sound of someone taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in. Like glaciers, the sound of VHS tapes will be a mythical thing of the past, called upon in the storytelling of useless old grandparental figures nostalgic for the birds, plants, polar bears, glaciers, life in general, and VHS tapes of their youth. How beautiful it is, I thought to myself, that there is still someone in the world who wants to spend a Sunday evening taking VHS tapes out of their cases and then putting them back in.

"It's probably porno," said Andrew.

By Regarding @ 3:11 PM | Comments (2)

Beverly! Or: Old Friends From Out of Town! Or: More Ways LA Doesn't Totally Suck (Damn it)

June 29, 2008 | Comments (2) | Permalink

By Regarding @ 7:50 AM | Comments (2)

Brain Itch

June 27, 2008 | Comments (3) | Permalink

How about the new New Yorker? I mean, how ABOUT that?? That's a good issue, right there. No b.s. turn-of-the-century exoticization of the primitives or dumb swimmer ladies who are willing to machine-gun polar bears in order to continue their dubious quest for personal glory. That's just a good old-fashioned issue of the New Yorker, with your crazy book review about the Tiannenmen Square massacre and your now-familiar-but-still-fascinating requisite "LOOK HOW BONKERS CHINA IS GETTING" article, and your totally killer Alice Munro short story, and some thing about Barack Obama, and Anthony Lane's hilarious, totally unironic worship of Angelina Jolie, and some review of "Hamlet" that I skipped.

And of course, the article about itching.

Itching!!!

I itched the whole time I read the article, which the article then addressed. "Thinking about itching makes you itch," it said, pointing out that you can make yourself itch by thinking about it, and you can make yourself itch by touching yourself, but only another person can tickle you. WTF? That little tidbit...so simple, yet so mind-blowing. Then the article jaunted off into the woo-woo spirit space of phantom limbs. YES! Phantom limbs is at least number five on my list of "things I like to discuss/think about," somewhere underneath "shark attacks" and somewhere above "advanced trigonometry." Phantom limbs!

The article told us about new theories of perception which hold that perception is largely inference. WTF??? That is so amazing! If you see a big old dog running behind a picket fence, what you really see is a dog all chopped up in little slices. But you "see" the whole dog, running. You don't have enough actual tangible information to really see what you "see," but your brain takes all the information it's learned about in its life, and sticks it altogether, and makes the informed assumption that what you are seeing must be a running dog, and not a strange series of dog-slices or several dogs or a picket fence that looks like slices of a dog. (They test babies about this stuff too, as I learned in an older New Yorker article. You roll a ball behind a wall--does the baby know the ball is back there? There's no visual indication that it is--you have to use inference. I can't remember what they found out about the babies. Probably that they aren't very good at finding balls, but who knows?).

The article didn't talk about it, but this seems like a pretty good way to understand various psychoses. Your brain makes the wrong assumptions about the information it receives--the paltry, broken, confused information that is the best our eyes and ears can do by themselves--and instead of telling you there is a dog running behind the fence, it instead informs you that aliens have landed and they want to suck your soul out of your eyeballs, and so since your good old reliable brain has told you that--and you have thus SEEN IT WITH YOUR OWN EYES--of course you believe it, and you go running around taking all your clothes off until the men in the white coats come and take you away (and then dump you off downtown at midnight in your hospital gown, if you happen to be unfortunate enough to be poor and Los Angelenian. But nevermind that!).

There is this woman who got shingles as a result of HIV. The shingles destroyed most of the nerves in the right side of her scalp. However, after she recovered, she began experiencing a horrible, nonstop itching underneath the numb part of the skin. She scratched and scratched. She saw specialists. She saw a psychiatrist. She scratched off all the hair around the area. She scratched all night in her sleep, waking up with blood everywhere. They'd bandage her up, she'd scratch off the bandages, the scabs, and dig back in there. She couldn't stop. They decided she had OCD, but she didn't think she did. It was just this damn itching! They decided there must be a couple nerves left alive in there, and they must be messed up from the shingles, sending her brain the incorrect feedback loop of itching. So they chopped the main nerve-thingy at the base of her skull, thus numbing her entire scalp. The itching persisted. This was no longer physically possible--there were officially no nerves left up there. What could be going on? One day she woke up and when she sat up in bed a bunch of green fluid poured down her face. She went to the hospital and they freaked out and sent her into surgery immediately. It turned out she had scratched all the way through her skull and into her brain. She then spent two years in a locked medical ward--not for crazy people, but for people with things like (I assume) Lesch-Nyham disorder, where you can't keep yourself from eating yourself. She spent two years tied to a hospital bed with bandaged hands. Now she has brain damage (from scratching her brain) and has to be in a wheelchair. But the itch is still there.

Then there is this doctor who has been treating phantom limbs with mirrors. He made this thing called a mirror box. Let's say you lost your arm in a fire or something. Lots of people, after losing a limb, continue to feel sensation in the missing limb. And not just vague stuff--real specific, acute stuff. People feel that their missing hand is clenched tightly, and they can't unclench it, and it bothers them. People feel itching and pain in their missing limbs that they can't fix--you can't scratch what's not there. So this doctor made this box where you put your good arm (or leg, whatever) in, and then look in the top. The mirrors work so that when you look inside, it LOOKS like you have two arms. And even though they know they don't really have two arms, the patients report that they immediately feel a great relief. Then he tells you to pretend you're conducting an orchestra. You wave your good arm, and you "wave" your missing arm. After awhile, almost all his patients felt their missing limb slowly shrink back into the stump and go away. The pain stopped. The itching stopped. The hand unclenched. There was one guy who had a tumor on his spine explode, and after it was all over he had this persistent feeling that his left hand was roughly twice its normal size. After eleven years, the New Yorker writer interviewed him and told him about the mirror box. The guy stood in front of a mirror in his living room and did the exercise, and his hand went back to normal. After a few weeks of doing the exercise every day, his hand was permanently back to normal and he could use it again.

The mirror-box works by tricking your brain! Your brain has gotten a faulty perception--that there's something wrong with the hand/arm/leg that's missing--and it's stuck in a feedback loop that you can't logic your way out of. Seeing the seemingly-functional missing hand snaps your brain back into reality BY CREATING A FICTION.

But what of the lady who scratched her brain? The phantom itch is on her head, which your brain knows you're only supposed to have one of. So you can't do the mirror image thing. The article ended on kind of a downer.

In closing: WTF????

HOORAY FOR BRAINS!

Speaking of brains, I just went up to the kid working at the library, and told him "I don't know how to do interlibrary loan," and asked him for help. We worked through all the rigmarole, and then it said that I wasn't allowed to do interlibrary loan on that book. "That's weird," he said, "I wonder why?" then we looked at the book's record in our own library, and it said "on hold at the music library." Since it's a book written in Italian about Berlioz, I couldn't imagine who else would want it. He went back to look. It turns out I myself requested it two days ago and then forgot about it. That was pretty embarrassing. Turns out I DO know how to do interlibrary loan.

BRAINS!

By Regarding @ 12:50 PM | Comments (3)