the_new_scottish_gentry's Xanga

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 03:08:54 GMT

After speaking with my legal counsel Mr. Katz I have decided to pull the plug on this blog. You see, starting on Friday and for the next three years, most of the noteworthy events in my life will occur as part of my professional duties as a medical resident. As such, the laws of patient confidentiality and the delirium of prolonged sleeplessness will likely conspire to prevent me from issuing any updates. Damn you HIPAA and 30+ hour shifts! I maintain the dim hope that I will still have time occasionally to read other Xangas and keep in touch with all you wonderful people, but if not please forgive me. I have greatly enjoyed blogging with you over the last nine months or so. It's been an absolute pleasure to share my frequently pointless and incredibly tangential thoughts with you. God bless.

I will leave you with a final admonition. Do not under any circumstances seek medical attention from this man:

I guarantee you he has no idea what he's doing. You have been warned.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:35:08 GMT

The 25 saddest songs ever, according to the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1502655,00.html

Note the shocking absence of Coldplay. Back to the miserable drawing board, Mr. Martin ...

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:53:45 GMT

Marvin Lweis: the Phantom Menace

During my sophomore year at Rice, I was haunted by an apparition. His name was Marvin Lewis. He was not another student. He was simply a ghost in the machine. Unfortunately, the machine in question resided within the Office of Financial Aid. Due to an Office Space-worthy glitch, all of my loan money was earmarked for a Marvin Lewis, a person who, if he existed at all, certainly wasn't enrolled at the university. It took a great deal of bureaucratic gymnastics to convince the accounting gurus that Marvin was just a figment of their imagination and that Marvin's money rightfully belonged to me. Thankfully, the problem got sorted out before I had to give up a kidney to pay for the fall semester but to this day I remain wary of Marvin's shadowy avarice.

A new non-existent archrival emerged yesterday. I received a borderline hysterical message from the residency office asking why I hadn't yet applied for my Texas physician-in-training permit. Didn't I know that I couldn't start working in the hospitals next week if I didn't have proper certification from the state? I called them back and pleaded ignorance, claiming truthfully that I had been hitherto unaware that I needed to clear this administrative hurdle. They insisted I had been sent the information more than a month ago. I continued to protest my innocence. Finally, remembering my past struggles with mistaken identity, I inquired as to what name they had used to process my paperwork, and the problem became clear. All the necessary information was being routed to one Mark Lweis. Somewhere, Marvin is laughing.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:53:51 GMT

Less-than-surprising news from Salon.com:

The results of Terri Schiavo's autopsy are in, and they make one Senate Majority Leader look very foolish. According to Pinellas-Pasco, Florida medical examiner Jon Thogmartin, Schiavo's brain had suffered massive and irreversible damage; it "weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain." Thogmartin also refuted assertions from Shiavo's parents and some members of the GOP that Schiavo could have recovered: "This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." But the kicker for those who tuned in to the footage of Schiavo seeming to follow the movement of helium balloons with her eyes is that the autopsy results show that "the vision centers of her brain were dead." In other words, Schiavo was blind.

Which, as blogger Nico at ThinkProgress aptly pointed out, is pretty much the opposite of what Bill Frist said in his "diagnosis" of Schiavo's condition back in March. Speaking from the Senate floor during a special late-night session, Frist disputed Schiavo's doctors' diagnosis of persistent vegetative state. "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office," he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. "She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:47:07 GMT

So the stomach pain returned last night, prompting me to reopen the case files. I think I've finally solved the mystery, and here are some fun facts that I learned along the way:

Fun Fact #1 -- If you leave butter out on the kitchen counter for several days during a Texas summer, it will become rancid.

Fun Fact #2 -- If you continue to use this butter, you will continue to get sick.

Sometimes I can't believe they made me a doctor. As my legendarily acerbic Aunt Cath told me recently, "You've got a lot of letters after your name, Lewis, but you don't have C.S. -- common sense".

Monday, June 13, 2005

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 17:19:59 GMT

It may look like the first sentence of this post to you, but it's actually the twentieth sentence I've typed -- the other 19 have just been deleted for containing the fraudulent notion that my weekend was uneventful. Upon further reflection, I have realized that my weekend was, in fact, full of events; however, my net impression of those events has been a negative one, prompting me to engage in some unfairly dispirited revisionist history. Here's what really went down. On Saturday, I became afflicted with what we in the medical profession refer to as a "stomach alien" (my apologies for the jargon). To date, I have been unable to determine the etiology of my gastrointestinal ailment, despite having subjected the contents of my refrigerator to a closely scrutinized line-up in the hopes of finding the culprit responsible for my food poisioning: could it have been you, suspiciously bulging Coke can? Or perhaps you're to blame, extremely old Old El Paso Chunky Salsa? Or could you have betrayed me, hastily consumed Blue Bell Hot Fudge Sundae ice cream? Et tu, chocolate syrup?! Regardless of the cause, the unpleasant symptoms have now ceased, thanks to the attentive care of my lovely wife. If nothing else, I learned this weekend that, when you're sick, it doesn't matter if you're a doctor. It makes a huge difference, though, if your spouse is a doctor. Stasha is a saint.

My brief illness cast a long shadow over the last few days, but there were still points of light worth remembering. For one thing, I was able to beat the odds and successfully complete Ill-Advised Home Improvement Project #354: Installing a Doggy-Door a/k/a the Texas Jigsaw Massacre. You see, faced with the prohibitive expense of the $8000 Swiss chalet doghouse [see last Monday's post for details], we decided to install a doggy-door instead, so that our boisterous terrier can come and go as he pleases between the backyard and the air-conditioned comfort of our home. On the box, this process is portrayed as taking place in four easy steps, executed by a smiling woman whose facial expression wordlessly conveys the Zen-like simplicity of cutting a 7"x11" hole in a solid wooden door. I found myself incapable of completing the project in four easy steps and followed a frustrating alternate route through 50 maddeningly difficult steps, the first of which involved removing the existing back door altogether. Since we're only leasing our house, and since our landlady mysteriously frowns upon irrevocable damage to her property, we had to unfasten her back door from its original 1950s hinges (thank goodness for WD40) and replace it with our own newly purchased back door, within which I was then free to cut a large hole.

But before I could wield power tools with a vigor worthy of Leatherface, I still had to obtain both the new door and the power tools. Lamentably, this required a trip to Home Depot, the site of numerous past humiliations, most notably a visit in February 2004 during which I asked several burly employees working in the lumber yard where *exactly* the garden gnomes were located, each time prompting a withering look of thinly veiled hatred. While they stared down contemptuously at my wispy frame, I could hear their internal monologues with crystal clarity: "I don't have time for your effeminate garden gnome nonsense, you pansy. If it wasn't against company policy, and if the dry cleaning required to remove your bloodstains from my orange smock wasn't so costly, I would beat you to within an inch of your life with any of the readily available two-by-fours". Or something like that. This time around, I was miraculously able to bluff my way through the acquisition of all the necessary items for my do-it-yourself project, but the specter of emasculating embarassment loomed again when I got out to the parking lot and attempted to fit the door into my less-than-expansive Saturn. It wasn't a task that could be readily accomplished single-handedly, but naturally none of the steroid-enhanced musclemen strolling past my car offered to help. Thanks a lot, guys, and good luck finding size-14 baseball caps.

Eventually, I managed to maneuver the door into the trunk of the car, albeit in a manner likely to decapitate any motorcyclists tailgating me during the drive home, and 'secured' it in place with a few bungee cords, each of which looked ready to snap like my bicep tendons that time I purchased a 350 lb. weight set at Academy, found myself unable to push it further than the checkout, and had to disassemble the box right there by the cash registers before carting each dumbbell out to the car individually. Anyway, once I got the door back to the house, I measured out the dimensions of the intended hole with surgical precision, drawing fine lines in pencil to guide the cuts of the sawblade. Then I turned the jigsaw on, and it was frighteningly powerful. So powerful, in fact, that within seconds it became apparent the jigsaw was going to cut whatever size and shape of hole it damn well pleased. Soon I was left with a jagged ellipse where I had wanted a neat rectangle. Oh well, at least I still had all my digits (a fact my worried wife called to confirm at 15-minute intervals). And throughout the hours and hours of sweat-drenched, expletive-spewing work my spirits were buoyed by the knowledge that Macintosh would love his new doggy-door, right? Right?! Wrong. He was petrified of it. He refused to go near it. Thus far, he can only be coaxed into using the door after consuming extravagant amounts of doggie treats, and he still regards this particular portal with fearful skepticism. Man's best friend indeed.

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:14:38 GMT

Add some culture to your iPod. Within the next two months, you'll be able to download all of Beethoven's symphonies for free courtesy of the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/beethoven/downloads.shtml

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 23:27:13 GMT

The Washington Post's MENSA Invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing of one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the winners for 2005 [my favorite is #2]:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

12. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

14. Glibido: All talk and no action.

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

18. Caterpallor (adj.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 16:36:12 GMT

Admission of bias: I love Coldplay. I wouldn't have rushed out this morning to buy their new album if I wasn't a serious fan. So please don't expect any objectivity or ironic detachment in the following, a track-by-track summary of my first impressions upon listening to "X&Y":

1. Square One -- Both previous albums boasted strong openings, and this song proves no exception to that pattern, although it's not nearly as delicate as "Don't Panic" or as brittle as "Politik". A swirling, barely tangible intro soon gives way to propulsive bass, chiming guitars, and soaring vocals. Detractors who accuse Coldplay of pilfering the U2 blueprint will easily accumulate more evidence for their plagiarism case here.

2. What If -- Gently expressed paranoia, as Chris Martin worries that he could irrevocably damage the perfect relationship with a single misstep. You can't really blame him; if my wife had once dated Brad Pitt I'd probably be wracked with self-doubt too.

3. White Shadows -- A pulsing beat and prominent synths show Coldplay attempting to update their sound, but their trademark cooing bridges and melodic choruses remain successfully intact. The song unfurls into a graceful coda as Chris urges his love to stay with him. Gwyneth, you need to sit this guy down and convince him once and for all that you really do prefer skinny British rock stars to genetically perfect American actors.

4. Fix You -- A slow-burning ballad that's potentially a monstrous hit, it's this album's equivalent to "The Scientist". The majestic chord progression that kicks in around the 3rd minute is simply gorgeous, seguing into the band's first-ever four-part vocal harmony. Unfortunately, the lyrics are a tad hackneyed in places, but that won't stop me from co-opting the "I will try to fix you" verse as the motto for my intern year.

5. Talk -- Unbelievably, this finds Coldplay basing an entire song around a Kraftwerk riff. I can't say I saw that one coming, but darn if it doesn't work, thanks in large part to Jonny Buckland's guitar line, which vacillates engagingly between precise and fuzzy.

6. X&Y -- More things are broken and in dire need of repair. People are diving into the deep end and then floating on tidal waves. Finally they drift away into outer space. I'm confused, and I can't help feeling that the strings are weighted too heavily in the mix, an overextended grasp at grandeur.

7. Speed of Sound -- Otherwise known as Clocks, Part II. Upon its release as a single, I expressed concern over the quality of its lyrical content, and sadly it would appear to have been representative of the songwriting on the album as a whole. Chris Martin has been gifted with a wonderful lilting falsetto, but all too often he employs his impressive vocal range to mouth mixed metaphors and obvious rhymes (I hate being able to complete a couplet before I've even heard the second half). It's true that the simplicity of his words helps to explain the band's enormous popular appeal -- almost anyone can relate to his romantic abstractions -- but that doesn't mean they couldn't be more artfully crafted.

8. A Message -- Another beautifully earnest paean to love. Clearly I will have no difficulty assembling a Valentine's mix for Stasha next year -- in fact, I could probably just copy this whole CD. The song's bursting-heart sentiments are tainted only by the fact that the "you're the target I'm aiming at" line seems ripe for misappropriation by stalkers.

9. Low -- With admirable pacing, its quicker tempo injects energy just as you expect the album to lag. Scrub away its sheen, and it would fit right in on "Parachutes".

10. The Hardest Part -- Surprisingly bright, given the dour title. Breaking up never sounded so sweet.

11. Swallowed by the Sea -- I like how the tracks have been sequenced here. Following "The Hardest Part", this is the ideal soundtrack for reconciling after the split as Chris realizes that he still belongs with the woman who "cut [him] down to size". After eleven songs, it's looking like Coldplay have been blessed with a bottomless supply of hooks.

12. Twisted Logic -- Darker and more powerful, cleansing the palate with a subtle bitterness after the preceding sugar rush. Also, if I'm not mistaken, I hear echoes of the arpeggios from the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" off "Abbey Road". Curious.

13. Til Kingdom Come -- Originally intended as a collaboration with Johnny Cash, this is by far the starkest song on the record, and one of my early favorites. In fact I dare to say that the Man in Black would have approved.

So, in summary, those of you who found "A Rush of Blood to the Head" underwhelming or overproduced will not be converted into rabid Coldplay devotees. If anything, this album sounds even bigger and more polished than its predecessor. And while there's no question that my soft spot for their melancholic balladeering remains, I now look back somewhat wistfully on the band's earlier recordings, particularly their first CD. On the one hand, there was a selfish possessiveness that I harbored then toward their burgeoning talent; I wanted them to stay a secretive delight. But more than that, "Parachutes" was simple, and there was something sublime about that simplicity. On "X&Y", an album whose gestation was surely burdened with the weight of a million expectations, it almost seems as if too much thought went into the final product. I can still discern great beauty amidst all the tinkering and tweaking, and perhaps over time I will come to appeciate their layered nuances, but right now I just have to listen harder to find the core of these songs.

Monday, June 06, 2005

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:16:35 GMT

OK, so Stasha and I love our West Highland terrier, Macintosh. I'm sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with the way we treat our pet as if he was a surrogate child. (Of course, all modern psychiatry simply amounts to pseudoscience, according to noted Hubbard disciple and future Nobel Prize winner Tom Cruise.) But even we have our limits. We've been looking into buying a doghouse so that Mac can comfortably remain outside while we're both on call, and it is absolutely obscene how much some people are willing to spend on canine accommodations. Check out this $8000 Swiss chalet for dogs, which makes our own house look like a shack. Who, other than Paris Hilton, is this being marketed to?