Holly Beach Inn

These are a couple of photos I took nearly a year ago in Holly Neck, MD. Take a look through the series if you're so inclined. I returned to the spot this past May to find that the inn had been demolished, so I'm glad to have photographed it while I still could.

I am also, in a way, glad that the old building has been euthanized, as it had clearly witnessed the kind of things that shiver men's sanity to flotsam. Imagine this starlit husk on moonless night, the relentless splash of Chesapeake waves on the reedy shoreline, and a circle of hooded, shadowy wights chanting tuneless hymns to an alien god long-forgotten. If this scene reeks of truth (as I am sure beyond sure that it does), it savors thus only because it was so. Can you not see their dusky cloaks? The glint of ancient stars upon the high priest's blade? And as you gaze upon their primal rite beware, for can those baleful wraiths not also see you?

Too Soon

I know I was amazed to discover that Michael Jackson passed away this week at the age of 50. If you're anything like me, you can't believe that his strange and scrutinized life has come to an untimely end. You might assume that these are the kind of shocking events that happen only once in long while.

But wait! There's more.

Call in the next ten minutes and you can get two fifty-year-old celebrity deaths in the same week! With your Michael Jackson, we'll throw in a Billy Mays at no extra charge! That's right. Michael Jackson and Billy Mays: a combined hundred-year-old value for just $20.09 plus shipping and handling. Act now, before this once-in-a-lifetime offer expires.







Yes, I know I'm going to burn in Hell, why do you ask?

Today I get my MCAT Score

I was once a competitive athlete, so I know about nerves. I have been anxious before. But I had never felt like every ounce of my blood was replaced by adrenaline until this morning. I slept fitfully, dreaming all night of checking my score. I woke up buzzing. My limbs feel light and the world seems kind of slow and gauzy. Perhaps having coped with failure already in my countless repetitive dreams last night has put me at peace with the possibility of disappointment, or at least as much at peace as I can expect to be.

I click the button.


"You have no scores yet."


Not until 5:00pm.


I can wait.

Trepanation for everyone!

A friend and colleague of mine just posted on her new blog, "silverware in the pancake drawer" (a Scrubs reference-- awesome!) about the woes of migraine headaches. The swiftly shifting season has afflicted her with agony, and she certainly has my sympathy.

But that is not the only purpose of this post, for she also idly commented that "On mornings like these, I wonder what the hell happened to trepanation." Ah, I'm so very glad you asked! I was intrigued by this question, and decided to waste a little time sniffing out trepanation (or trepanning) on the intertubes. There is, as usual, an embarrassment of riches when it comes to searching the world wide web, so I've only included some choice morsels, and links for further exploration below.



In 1978, a Briton named Amanda Fielding ran for Parliament in Chelsea and received 40 votes. Her platform promised that the National Health Service would offer free trepanation services to all and sundry. Yes, that's trepanation:
Most politicians assume their constituents have holes in their heads, but it is a true rara avis who promises to put one there for you. But it's only fair, I suppose, since Ms. Fielding had performed her own craniotomy with a dental drill and some local anesthetic. She decided to air out her cerebrum under the tutelage of Bart Huges, a Dutch almost-doctor who was denied his MD either for advocating marijuana use or for failing his obstetrics course. Or because he's a raving lunatic. Known as "the father of modern trepanation," Huges is the author of a number of works, including an eight-foot scroll articulating his view that people who drill holes in their skulls are representatives of the next stage in human evolution, or homo sapiens correctus. It should be unsurprising that most of his research seems to have involved dropping acid and drilling into his own skull. Trepanation is, for Huges and his followers, merely the next step in mind-expansion, following LSD and presumably preceding the injection of reindeer urine into your eyeballs. "Gravity," says Huges, "brings you down," so he used to stand on his head to try and defeat it.

Yeah.

So anyway, poking holes in your cranium has a long history, and was generally used to help shamans communicate with the spirit world, or to drive out the evil spirits that inhabited people's heads. Want to chat with the ancestors? Pop! Hallucinating? Pop! Headaches? Pop! Speaking against the priesthood? Pop!

Well, I suppose "pop" is not quite the correct onomatopoeia. Another acolyte of Huges' by the name of Joseph Mellen (whose cooperative acid trips and skull-drilling with Amanda Fielding would lead to their eventual marriage and spawning of offspring), described his own experience thus:

"After some time there was an ominous-sounding shlurp and the sound of bubbling… It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out."

OK, if the idea of "an ominous-sounding schlurp" coming from inside your bloody skull isn't enough to make you question the wisdom of this procedure, then you're a stouter (and stupider) man than I, Gunga Din.

All of this is not to say that cranial aeration doesn't have its place in the realm of legitimate medical procedures. Often, to relieve intracranial pressure or hematoma, it is necessary to remove a piece of the skull. However, there's a vast gulf between a trained surgeon doing so in order to save a patient's life and a drug-addled guru helping his disciples grind holes in their foreheads in quest of "expanded consciousness."



So that, then, is what the hell happened to trepanation. Next time you're wishing you could release those migranous miasmas, remember that a vote for Fielding is a vote for a dental drill in every home.



(For more insight into the people who drill for gray matter, check out "Lunch With Heather Perry" at Neurophilosophy, "trepanation" at The Skeptic's Dictionary, and "Like a Hole in the Head" from Cabinet Magazine.)

Upgrade Your Neural Implant

Braingate Neural Interface Developing Into Wireless Version

The potential implications and applications of this are, dare I say, mind-blowing.

"The sixth age shifts / Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon..."

Interesting article from The Daily Galaxy:

The End of Aging?

De Grey's call to action, writes Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and author of How We Die and The Art of Aging, "is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future.” An opinion darkly countered by Dr. Martin Raff, emeritus professor of biology at University College London and coauthor of Molecular Biology of the Cell: “Seems to me this man could be put in jail with reasonable cause.”

Despite the fact that the name "Aubrey de Grey" sounds like it belongs to a megalomaniac villain, and the irony that de Grey is fighting de gray, this kind of thing is like scientific catnip to me. It has the right blend of pseudoscientific wackiness and a genuine appeal to the relief of one of my darker fears. If de Grey is a nut, then this is entertaining claptrap on the order of cold fusion. But if he's right, I'll be the first to sign up for immortality, ethics be damned.

Oy, Forsooth!

Here's an awesome tidbit from medieval blog In the Middle:

Medieval Jew Punks Christians

It's really a bit surprising that this guy got to wait around and be killed by God's subtle knife, because if I were a medieval Christian, I totally would have drawn and quartered him. I guess it is rather appropriate that the Jew died of guilt, though. His mother probably wouldn't stop nagging him about spending his time playing pranks on the goys instead of studying leech-craft and giving her grandchildren with that nice girl from the next ghetto.

Also, Gerald of Wales was kind of a jerk. Just saying.

Cortisol

OK, so this article about the President's address to the AMA grinds my gears a bit-- not just as the son of physicians and a future doctor myself, but as a logical person who appreciates balanced reporting.

I'm okay with Obama not limiting jury damages in malpractice cases, and I get where he's coming from. I'm not proud of the fact that he got booed. But what really bugs me is the lack of understanding displayed by the criticism of doctors for contributing to the inflated cost of health care by ordering "unnecessary tests." I can't claim expertise in the matter, but it seems to me that if doctors were not quite so afraid of being embroiled in malpractice suits over negligence, they could relax their hyperactive testing and procedures a bit. Don't get me wrong: I'm sure a lot of doctors are greedy SOBs who do it for the kickbacks, but you can't tell me that's the motivation in every case. So it troubles me that there seems to be a change in the prevailing winds, that now accusatory fingers are being pointed squarely at doctors, often without appropriate context.

Undoubtedly, some people actually know what they're talking about. And yes, Atul Gawande, I'm looking at you. As Dr. Gawande explained, the nation's doctors must cut down on the exorbitant expenses incurred by patients, but he recognizes the complexities of the issue:

"Fixing this problem can feel dishearteningly complex. Across the country, we have to change skewed incentives that reward quantity over quality, and that reward narrowly specialized individuals, instead of teams that make sure nothing falls between the cracks for patients and resources are not misused [emphasis added]."

The skewed incentives are not only the monetary rewards that doctors gain by loading up on dubious rigmarole, but the incentive to avoid accusations of negligence. Pace organic chemistry, the specter of malpractice is one of the scariest things faced by aspiring physicians. Reading ER doc blogger WhiteCoat's "Trial of a WhiteCoat" series (which is the ongoing account of his own malpractice suit), I can't help worrying that someday I'll also be held accountable for negligence if I don't order some test or consult some specialist quickly enough, and a grieving family assumes that my hesitation to call in the heavy artillery was what killed their loved one. So I completely understand the urge to open up with the whole battery of technological marvels, fill them full of contrast and blast them with radiation, poke, prod, jab, scan, biopsy, and consult with the experts in the interest of avoiding someone suing your scrubs off. So the criticisms being leveled at the doctors are perhaps valid, but they need to be contextualized in order to be fair.

Oh, and this quote?

Obama did not blame the doctors. Instead, he tried to woo them, much as he has done with recalcitrant foreign leaders.

Really, is it really necessary to lump us in with Ahmadinejad and Co.? I don't think so.

Yo ho ho, and a... wait, what?

This is the Somali Navy training to fight pirates:

[BBC News]

Guys, the footwork is impressive and the jaunty way you're holding your hands just so is quite debonair, but I think you're dealing with the other kind of pirates.

Yeah, not these guys:
These guys:
Oh, you realized that? Right, OK, well... cool. Yeah, just checking. No, I know. You were totally thinking of the pirates with RPGs and AK-47s, not the ones with cutlasses and cannons, and... yeah. Cool. Well, um... keep up the training there. Yeah.

Alo, Salut, sunt eu, un haiduc...

Somehow, this article from the BBC tells you pretty much all you need to know about Romania.

The gist of it is this: Gigi Becali was a shepherd "who made a fortune in land deals" and now owns the country's biggest soccer team. He is "a devout Christian" (as the golden icon in his photograph no doubt tipped you off), and he's one of Romania's most flamboyant politicians. Described as a "Robin Hood figure," he announced his candidacy for European Parliament from prison. Why was he in jail? When some thieves stole his car and demanded a ransom, he first paid the money, then sent a gang of thugs to trap, kidnap, and beat up the thieves.

Naturally, the thieves went to the police to complain about the violence, and Becali was arrested. Now he has been released and got himself elected as MEP, but a travel ban has been placed on him while the investigation is underway. As a matter of course, he's decided to ignore the ban and go to Brussels anyway, challenging the Romanian authorities to arrest him there.

Romania is a very odd country, and if my own experiences there are any indication, crime is viewed somewhat differently there than it is in other parts of the world. The long conversation I had with a cutpurse named Funny on a Bucharest city bus is a story for another time, but I mention it now because of the relative nonchalance with which he admitted to being a thief, and his emphasis on theft as a rectification of the injustices of class difference. Granted, I'm still unsure of Funny's mental soundness, but he seemed to see himself as a kind of Robin Hood, as well.

And I've just remembered something else: as I was about to wonder whether there was an analogous Robin Hood figure in Romania, I suddenly flashed back to a restaurant in Braşov where I ate cotlet haiducesc, or outlaw's porkchop. As referenced in the title of this post, the song "Dragostea Din Tei" (arguably Romania's biggest export since Dracula) also has the singer calling himself "haiduc."* From a completely unresearched perspective, I get the sense that there is a romanticized outlaw folklore in Romania. I think I'll look into it.

"Hæþenra manna hergunc adilegode Godes cyrican..."

This is the first time I have updated this blog while mentally compromised. I am currently feeling the effects of copious mead and ale (as promised to those who attended my party tonight), for I have just finished celebrating the 1,216th anniversary of the Vikings' sack of Lindisfarne Abbey in 793 CE. We played a fantastic game of Viking's Cup (my invention), but I believe I was the only one imbibing the honeyed nectar of Valhalla. As such, all I have to say right now is this:

Hail Odin, the All-father, ruler of Asgard and inspiration of the skalds.

I'm going to drink a lot of water before I go to bed, and pray to the Aesir that I am spared the all-too-imminent repercussions of the night's excesses. May the gods smile upon you.