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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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Medicine, nursing, health

The virtual desk at the moment
Home lifeIrelandMedicine, nursing, healthThe COVID-19 pandemic

Business As (un)Usual

by Diane Duane April 4, 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic spreading itself about, it seemed like a good idea to give people a local status report of what’s going on with us over here. The short version of that is: we’re fine. Peter and I are safe at home, sheltering in place—sort of pre-cocooning (since neither of us is quite old enough to come under that aspect of the present Irish restrictions)—and life for us is going on pretty much as usual.

A little more back story might be useful here for those who don’t know us well. Since we both work from home, and have for many years, our normal lifestyle already looks a whole lot like what a lot of people are now being forced to put up with. We live in a little cottage out in the wilds of West Wicklow, a very rural area—where, unless we actually went out of the house for a walk longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, it’d be rare for us to see so much as a car or truck or tractor. And as for seeing or interacting with other human beings—sure, one might come along once a day or so walking their dogs, but that’d be about the size of it. And our business days look like this: (1) getting up, showering, having breakfast (or whatever passes for that meal, because Peter sometimes works different hours from me: is it really breakfast at 2 in the afternoon?); (2) heading into our separate work spaces—Peter’s is upstairs in what doubles as a guest bedroom, mine’s downstairs in the living room—and (3) getting on with work: writing, and the assorted business that surrounds it.

There’s no travel associated with our work beyond going up and down the stairs. Meals happen at home, the vast majority of them home-cooked. We have only one place anywhere near us where we’d eat out—the local pub, about a mile’s walk away. The next closest would be in our nearby shopping town, Baltinglass, about 8 km away. (This would be where we would send for takeout, assuming we wanted Chinese. That’s all that’s available in terms of being delivered all this way out to us.) …If you’ve noted that the concept of walking places keeps coming up, well, we gave up our car about fifteen years ago because we found that we really just didn’t need it. For six days out of seven, on the average, it was sitting out in the back, literally growing moss, while still needing to have insurance, car tax, and so forth paid on it. (We let the cats sleep in it sometimes; they started thinking it was their flat.) …Finally we said “The heck with this!”, and let the car go in favor of either renting a car when necessary—an option no longer possible since the local rental chain started making that difficult for the self-employed—or using local cab companies to take us to Baltinglass for shopping, or to connect with public transit (Bus Eireann) into Dublin and beyond. And that’s how things have gone… until a month or so ago.

Without needing to get into the entire timeline of the coronavirus as it affects Ireland, early signs of what was going to happen were already beginning to make themselves plain to me around the last time that we actually had to leave the house for anything. That was the end of February, and a week later at the beginning of March, when I needed (first) to have have routine bloods drawn and (second) to go see our GP for a routine checkup. A day or so after the second visit, I started noticing a runny nose and a bit of a cough that I hadn’t had before. Immediately I got concerned, as not once but twice within the past ten days I’d been sitting in a doctor’s waiting room for a good while. For safety’s sake, starting in the first week of March I decided it’d be smart to self-isolate until I was completely clear what was going on. (Those of you who follow me on Tumblr will have seen mention of this.)

Fortunately the concern turned out to be unfounded. By the 20th it became clear that the runny nose was just secondary to a long-standing, on-and-off chronic sinus infection, and a reaction to the usual seasonal pollens. And to say I was relieved would be understating the case. It’s tough to concentrate on managing other universes when you’re sitting there wondering if you’re about to start sickening with something that has a pretty good chance of killing you in this one. (At the age of going-on-68, I’m unquestionably in dodgy territory, and Peter’s not too far behind me.)

Anyway, by the time that Ireland declared its stay-at-home lockdown, I’d already been sitting tight for a couple of weeks, and I just kind of shrugged. So did Peter. For us, staying in the house and being at the desk for hours at a time, or sprawled in the Comfy Chair or on the living-room sofa binging Netflix (which thank God we can actually do now since we finally had real no-shit broadband installed last year to replace the pay-as-you-go cellular that was previously the best we could get in this neck of the woods)—is exactly what life around here usually looks like, for days on end. (Not least because when depending on a taxi service means we must automatically attach an extra €30 or $40 price tag to everything—from the simplest, quickest shopping trip to a night out at the pub—that’s not an option we overuse.) As for being forced to isolate with another person for a week or two (or three) on end… well, that too is what life around here usually looks like. It’s a good thing we really like each other a lot.

The main change/inconvenience at the moment is that the cab service we use closed itself down for the duration as well. (Which frankly makes sense, as in none of their cars would it be possible to enforce physical distancing.) So in the short term, we really are confined to barracks whether we like it or not… except for walking the maximum 2km from home that present restrictions allow for purposes of exercise. But by and large, other life events have been going on pretty much as usual, and immediate needs pretty much get fulfilled.

Food, for example. Our groceries are normally delivered to us by one of the two supermarket chains that serve our area, Tesco and Supervalu, because we don’t always have time or inclination to go out for them. Granted, at the moment this business is more complicated than usual. Way more people in our area (as one might expect) are now availing themselves of the service than would’ve done so before. So instead of being able to get on the computer and order groceries to be delivered tomorrow—or today, if you get the timing right—you now have to watch the stores’ websites like a hawk for delivery slots opening up, and they’re never any closer than a week or two away. (Our next delivery slot is April 14… and I really, really hope we can make the present jug of milk last long enough to keep Peter in milk for his tea until then.) Also, don’t get me started about yeast. For someone who’s routinely baked bread two or three times a week for the last 10 years or more, suddenly having other people buy the available supply of yeast and flour out from under me is a bit of a pain. Especially as I think, knowing human nature, of the many, many, MANY packages of yeast that are almost certainly going to sit in the backs of people’s cupboards and never again see the light of day until someday five years from now, 10 years from now, they’re thrown out. (…Oooh, bitter much?…)

Other life-infrastructure isn’t too much of a problem, as we’ve had lots of time to work out the bugs and workarounds of a non-car-enabled lifestyle in this part of the world. Other household needs besides food can mostly be ordered in; heating oil, for example (paid for over the phone and delivered by the nice guy who comes along, fills the tank and goes away), and firewood (call another nice guy, arrange payment: bags of wood and turf get left for us). Minor pharmaceuticals, if we need them,  we order from an online pharmacy down-country. Banking’s all done online since our local branch office closed. So is almost all other bill paying. So’s almost all of our communication. And as far as income goes, at the moment most of it comes from Ebooks Direct—the operation of which is handled from my desktop—and by other means of payment-for-writing that aren’t physical to begin with.

To sum everything up: we’re having things a lot easier than a lot of the people around us… a situation the irony of which isn’t lost on me. Usually it’s more the other way around. I look on with wonder and encouragement at the increasingly creative ways that people around the planet are finding here to get around the limitations imposed on them and still make life work, for themselves and for the people around them… especially at the small business end.

But “easy” is relative. Increasingly the news makes more and more difficult viewing for me. I was taught enough epidemiology in my public-health unit in nursing school to understand the broad strokes of how what’s now happening must play out. What’s happening in Europe and Ireland are bad enough… but I’m deeply frustrated and frightened by what’s going on in New York in particular right now, in hospitals I knew well because I worked in them or knew people who did. I’m distressed by the prospect of what will most likely unfold as the surge of very sick people starts spreading equally aggressively in other parts of the country—places that are even less well prepared or defended against what’s coming because many people living there have been taught to believe that this pandemic isn’t real. And I grieve for my former colleagues at the nursing and medical end who’re dying on the front lines, and ache for those now having to make choices they never should’ve had to make, being forced to work under conditions that they could surely never have imagined.

At this point I suspect no one’s surprised by the notion that we’re all now caught in the midst of a century-changing event, one that’ll be as profound in its influence as the events of any other pandemic or world war. And that said, there’s no escaping the truth that this will be a tough time all around, even for those of us who (out of the sheer luck of the draw) are sitting comfortably at home in our usual circumstances, without having to deal with sudden changes in the way things are on their own turf. We’ve got a roof over our heads, enough money to buy food and ways to get it into the house, work to do and no fear of being laid off or fired… with the certainty that we have not been exposed to coronavirus and are (under present circumstances, anyway, while we keep ourselves battened down) most unlikely to be. What can’t be put aside for either Peter or me, though, is the sense of the sheer luck we’re benefiting from, and the certain knowledge of the level of privilege that’s functioning on our behalf. There are a hundred ways in which things could have been very different—especially had this been one of those years that required us to be on the road in the course of work. The concept’s really unsettling.

And along those lines, our thoughts go constantly to friends who’re facing into this crisis while also saddled with financial trouble—work loss, job loss; friends with family sick with COVID-19 or something else, and unable to be with them; friends struggling to get critical work done despite the circumstances; friends stuck far from home who can’t get back there. Every day’s news, every day’s Twitter, is full of the cruelty and irrationality of people in places of power who should be doing much, much better… as well as of the sacrifice of fellow professionals and of people being gentle with each other.

It’s hard to get on with business under these circumstances… particularly the unending uncertainty about what may come next. Concentration’s far more difficult than usual. Yet making the effort to stay focused and working is part of what I described to someone, some while back, as wanting to “be found at my post” when a crisis came; since this is the job I do, the one thing I’m really suited for, and it matters to keep doing it. …So I’m staying as focused as I can on that.

A number of projects are in progress at the moment. The (LGBTQ) Middle Kingdoms-universe work Tales of the Five #3, The Librarian is well along, and I’m aiming for publication at Ebooks Direct in late April/early May. (No episode of this “prose miniseries” will appear at Amazon until they’re all complete, around the end of Q4 2020.) The new Young Wizards interstitial work Interim Errantry 3: A Day at the Crossings is in progress and scheduled for publication (at both Ebooks Direct and Amazon) in Q3 of 2020. The extremely peculiar first episode of the “Digits of Destiny” series, The Thumb of Zorbo, is also well under way and may be the next thing that comes out from me. And rather to my surprise, I find myself writing Some Watery Tart, in which the Lady of the Lake finally spills the tea on King Arthur’s court. Don’t ask me when to expect that, as I haven’t the slightest idea. …There’s also a TV miniseries being restructured for pitching, and a novel that Peter and I are getting ready to start writing together; and, of course, The Door Into Starlight. But I’m not going to get into more detail about those right now.

Anyway: Peter and I are keeping on “keeping on” through this bizarre time, and will keep doing so unless/until something unexpected happens. I’m on Twitter a lot, in the normal course of things, so if something goes wrong, goes south or gets weird, look for early indications there. Meanwhile, if you feel like encouraging the artist in her labors: feel free to buy a coffee (check the right-hand column here), grab a discounted ebook (we’ve got a 50%-off sale running for the foreseeable future)… or just think good thoughts. Those are always appreciated.

And now back to what I’m binging at the moment (Handsome Siblings on Netflix), and yet another attempt to answer the eternal question: How the hell do these people go out fighting all dressed in white and wind up without so much as a smudge on them? Sure, this is fantasy, but that’s just stretching it too far…

Meanwhile, wherever you may be: take care of yourself.

April 4, 2020
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Hiccup and Toothless
Hobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMedicine, nursing, healthObscure interests

The hiccup cure

by Diane Duane April 25, 2017

First of all: why did I use the image above? Because I don’t like any of the stock art available for the term “hiccups”, and I do love Toothless and his boss. So if you think this is going to be anything to do with How To Train Your Dragon, please be disabused of the idea. This post is about curing hiccups.

It’s a copy of information that appears elsewhere about the one true “magic” trick I know. Somebody just retweeted the Google Plus post I did about it some years back, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a copy here at my own blog. Seems like an omission. So here it is.

Disclaimer: I know that this is one of those endlessly contentious subjects, and there will be people who rise up immediately and insist “That’s not how it works at all” and will cry BUSHWAH and so forth. I’m entirely happy for them to do that, and I wish for them that Their Mileage May Vary in peace, and that their hiccup cures may always work. As for this explanation: I trust my source implicitly — he was busy very effectively and good-naturedly saving lives on a 24-hour shift when I ran into him — and, most to the point, this strategy works: reliably, repeatedly, past any possible doubt of its effectiveness when considered statistically, and to the endless amazement of many skeptical (and badly hiccuping) people across two continents.*  Nuff said.

And now for the details on How To Cure Hiccups. ADDITIONAL AND IMPORTANT ADVISORY RIGHT UP FRONT: if you are on a sugar- or sodium-controlled diet of any kind, this solution is most likely not for you. Consult your physician before attempting it.

One afternoon [in 2011]  while working, I found myself listening to a local TV station’s “science lady” attempting to explain the cause of hiccups… and getting it all wrong. As usual, this event makes me want to share what I was long ago taught about the subject by a medical resident in the emergency room at New York Hospital (now Cornell/NYH Medical Center). He took five minutes to explain the physiological mechanisms behind hiccups, and then taught me a simple, foolproof three-step method for stopping them dead.

So here’s The Hiccup Cure. (And if you share this around, please do so in some way that will allow as many people as possible to see it, so that more folks can be spared the Curse of Hiccup Embarrassment. Thank You For Your Continued Support.) 🙂

The explanation: Hiccups are the result of an chemical imbalance in your blood — a temporary derangement of the normal acid/alkaline balance of your blood electrolytes. There are all kinds of reasons why this can happen all of a sudden, but the most common ones are talking too much while eating (my favorite), and eating or drinking too fast, and some kinds of emotional stress, and periods of sudden exercise (running for a bus, etc). Different causes tend to induce different kinds of imbalance, but the commonest ones are these:

(a) Respiratory acidosis — too much CO2 in the blood: and
(b) Respiratory alkalosis — too little CO2 in the blood.

When you get one or the other of these, the body’s tendency is to try to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs’ contents in and out a lot faster, so that if there isn’t enough CO2, some more can get into the bloodstream, and if there’s too much, some can get out.

The body doesn’t want to bother your conscious mind with this, so it handles the problem in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your diaphragm spasm repeatedly, compressing the lungs and trying to shove a significant percentage of their tidal volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.

Now, understanding this, you’d think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly, and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem right. Well, probably it will. But it takes forever, and you meanwhile are sitting there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can themselves keep making the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to take more drastic measures.

It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups themselves is to quickly increase the electrolyte imbalance significantly. The simple three-step intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn’t work, the less common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you’re most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and hiccuping.

Step 1: Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry, in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden extreme change in the blood chemistry, “calls off” the hiccups as ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The “spoonful of sugar” approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of hiccuppers.

If this doesn’t work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.

Step 2: Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It’s gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang, right away.

If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis, but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.

Step 3: Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it. (Or alternately, give them a small spoonful of vinegar if no lemon is available. But lemon works better.) Their hiccups will then vanish.

WARNING: It is vitally important to do these things in order and not try to cut back on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and you’ll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying, especially if you’re on a low-sodium diet or just don’t feel like retaining liters and liters of water the next day.

But if you follow these instructions faithfully, the hiccups will vanish. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with this routine.

A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane’s Law of Necessitative Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you’ll fall very low in their estimation if you don’t, they will always be alkalotic, and you will always have to run through all three stages, feeling dumber and more desperate every moment as you go along and nothing seems to be working. (This law first became plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my producer for the “Science Challenge” educational series I wrote at the BBC: if I hadn’t proven I was good at the science part by curing him, well, you can imagine.)

And a note in passing: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures are, in one way or another, attempting to exploit this electrolyte-shift mechanism (though most of them are fairly ineffective at it). Scaring the person (causes acidosis: see The Andromeda Strain), drinking water upside down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto), whatever: they are all merely thin pale versions of the One True Cure.

So there you have it. May it do you (and those around you) good.  🙂

*Still working on that third one.

April 25, 2017
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Home lifeIrelandMedicine, nursing, healththings that piss you off

The Adventure of the Dexter Eye

by Diane Duane November 27, 2016

I’d have preferred to call it The Adventure of the Sinister Eye because that sounds a lot cooler, but that eye’s not the problem today. (For a change.) I’ve been reading Arthur Conan Doyle this weekend, so let’s think of this as an Adventure for the time being.

The news is that I may or may not have developed a tear in the retina of my right eye. This being the case, one way or another life around here for the next week is about to get lively.

Some of you will have noted from previous posts over this year that I’ve had an ongoing problem with the retina in my left eye. This kind of thing is no surprise with someone who’s (a) over 60 and (b) very very nearsighted: the shape of the eyeball means the retina’s more likely to have trouble staying in place.

Well, this morning I woke up with a shadow in my right eye that has no business being there. It’s not a floater (of which I have plenty). This thing is holding still. (Cue irate fist-shaking at unresponsive ceiling. “THIS IS THE *GOOD(ish)* EYE, DAMMIT!!”)

Now, this being rural Ireland and relatively late on a Sunday, there is not a damn thing I can do that will do any good until tomorrow. I get to hold still until tomorrow morning and call my retinologist in Dublin first thing.

This is all insanely annoying because I’m presently doing the last work on INTERIM ERRANTRY 2, the completed version of which is supposed to launch tomorrow in the Ebooks Direct store to coincide with #CyberMonday. (And I’m still doing the work: sitting here and twitching isn’t going to help anything.)

We’ll see how that goes. But some folks have said they wish they could help. If you’d like to, then the best thing you can do right now is pop over to Ebooks Direct and buy some ebook that you like the look of… as with one thing and another, this is going to get to be an expensive week.

I think I may also have committed to livetweet the Journey To The Eye Doctor. (rolls eyes at self) (gingerly) My eye lady has an office full of nifty equipment, and I bet I can get her to at least give me a .jpg of the back of my retina to share with everybody.

Anyway, let’s all cross our fingers. It might just be something transient and not so bad as a tear. But if it *is* just a tear, there are ways to mend it that are actually office procedures these days. We’ll see how it goes…  Starting tomorrow morning, I’ll update this post as we go along. But for the time being I may as well get back to work.

(Oh, and if you’re interested in buying anything, here’s the store’s sale page’s URL. The entire store inventory will appear at the bottom of it: give it a moment to load and then scroll down. Also, if you know someone you think might be interested in the situation [or the sale!] and care to share this with them, please feel free. The sale will be continuing, at the 50%-off-everything level for a little while more.)

http://ebooksdirect.co/…/our-2016-black-friday-cyber-monday…

ETA: And here’s a copy of the post at Facebook that tells what happened next.)

Part 1: What happened to me was (thank all Gods in the neighbourhood) NOT any kind of retinal detachment, vitreous detachment, or similar traumatic damage to the retina. So today’s teaching moment is: even if you are a health care professional (or former one) and expert at Googling For Symptoms, don’t be so sure you know what’s going on.
 
This means that I’ve dodged this bullet, only to find I’m standing in front of a bigger, slower one.*
 
Part 2: What seems to have happened to me is a small transient circulatory blockage in the retina. The signature of this event can be seen as what is called over here a “cotton wool spot”. When I scan the pic from the dye photography and post it here later, you’ll see it quite clearly. (This is why my retinologist was very definite with me that she wanted this test done today: this evidence, she says, would likely have vanished within a few weeks.)
 
This is a herald of other things that are likely going on elsewhere. So over the next couple of weeks I get to go to my GP here and have a full workup of bloods and various other diagnostic procedures, with an eye to ruling in/out a complex of possibilities: circulatory system problems, heart problems, incipient diabetes, plaque, sunspots, you name it. (There are way too many possible causes for this event…) (OKAY, maybe not sunspots.)
 
There will also need to be a detailed ultrasound of both eyes. Which I get to pay for. (Notwithstanding that the left eye, aka The Bad Wicked Naughty Eye, has been blissfully quiet through all this and is described by the retinologist as “behaving itself just fine”.)
So I’ll be leaving the Ebooks Direct store running in sale mode (50% off everything) for a little while. Thanks again HUGELY to those who by picking up an ebook or so assisted in the day’s events. I was thinking of you all the time. Well, maybe not when I was eating the scone. It was a REALLY GOOD SCONE.) Those who might like to continue to assist with all the other medical stuff that will need to be paid for over December, please feel to nip over to the store’s sale page, which shows our whole inventory, and grab something that you like the look of.
 
Part 3: So I’m recovering by eating a double portion of calamari at Gotham Cafe in South Anne Street, and sopping up a glass or two of white Cab Sauv. What I would LIKE to do now? Go over to Chez Max by Dublin Castle and MURDER a *steak frites*. What I am GOING to do now? Run over to Asia Market and buy a jug of soy sauce (seriously, how do we go through this shit so fast? I swear Peter drinks it the way he drinks maple syrup), then take the bus home and hug my honey.
 
Thank you all for accompanying me on this madness. 🙂 More bulletins from the front line as they become available.
 
(also: later I’ll tell you about how I missed the bus to the clinic. Not NSFW by any means, but possibly TMI. Never mind: if you read my posts you’ve probably signed up for that. Or should know that you have.)
 
*If you read my work, you know this anyway. But here I’m not speaking of the Slowest Bullet, which hits us all. …Hmm, what a great anthology title..
November 27, 2016
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Going deeper
Film and TVliteratureMediaMedicine, nursing, healthTV in generalWriting

“Going Deeper”: searching for the secrets in Dr. John Watson’s CV

by Diane Duane April 17, 2013

Last year I wrote a post called “The Starship and the Upstairs Flat” which concerns the longstanding (and until then, one-sided) relationship between the Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek canons. While working on that, I had cause to go have a look at the Sherlock  DVDs, because in “The Blind Banker” we get a quick glimpse at John’s CV, and I wanted to examine it in detail.

(This was as much a harking back to old habits as mere curiosity. Nurses like to have the salient professional details about the doctors they know, and especially the ones they work with. Back in the day, when it was much harder to lay hands on pertinent details than just Googling for them, my colleagues and I were definitely not above quietly sending away for the State Board scores of doctors whose expertise we weren’t sure about.)

I hadn’t given much more thought to the subject until recently, when I had reason to look more closely at the Doctor’s CV. When I did, I began to realize that it says all kinds of interesting things about John Watson to a (former) health professional. Discussion follows…

Continue Reading
April 17, 2013
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Current eventsEuropeFeaturedHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeMedicine, nursing, healthPsychology / psychiatry

The Eyes in the Peacock’s Tail

by Diane Duane June 7, 2011

Once upon a time, the King of the Greek gods, Zeus, was getting ready to cheat on his wife again. His latest target was a beautiful mortal girl named Io, whose resistance he’d been wearing down by sending her a series of racy dreams of which he was the star. Having finally arrived on her doorstep to make his case in person, Zeus wrapped the two of them and that whole region of the world in a thick black cloud to hide the incipient goings-on.

This was a serious tactical error. Zeus’s wife Queen Hera noticed the peculiar change in the weather, checked Olympus to see if her husband the Cloudgatherer was on site, and – not finding him there – immediately put two and two together and headed for the area of sudden overcast. She dispersed the clouds and found herself looking at her husband and an extremely lovely (and one must assume, confused-looking) white cow, which Zeus explained had sprung from Mother Earth just that minute.  Not even slightly fooled, Hera promptly confiscated the cow, and assigned to guard her – or rather, to make sure her husband didn’t get anywhere near her – one of her security staff, a creature by the name of Argus. Argus was completely covered with eyes that stared in every direction and saw everything for miles around. The eyes even slept in shifts, so that the watcher’s pitiless regard was inescapable by night or day. Hera went off confident that her husband’s case was well handled.

Myths being what they are, of course, such a situation can’t last. Zeus quickly has words with Olympus’s resident thief, trickster and inside-job man, Hermes, who disguises himself as a handsome shepherd boy and  shows up in the flowery meadow where Argus is guarding Io. There he proceeds to bore all Argus’s eyes to sleep by telling him serial tales of mortal romance.* Then, when the last of Argus’s eyes fall asleep, Hermes pulls out his sword and kills him, signaling, if not the end of Io’s troubles, at least the beginning of the end. Later on the frustrated Hera winds up putting all of Argus’s eyes in the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock — probably as a reminder to Zeus that at least this once she caught him in near-flagrante — and over the subsequent centuries Argus’s name becomes a metaphor for unsleeping watchfulness.

The world is full of people who appoint themselves to roles like Argus’s, as would-be watchers and guardians. Sometimes they’re even useful in those roles. Their motives aren’t always suspect: sometimes they genuinely mean well. But good intentions aren’t always enough. And sometimes these can lead the would-be guardians into serious mistakes, especially when their intelligence (in the informational sense) is incomplete or poor.

It looks like we’ve just seen an example of this in a recent Wall Street Journal article, which spends a while purporting to analyze the “fitness for purpose” of some modern-day young adult fiction, the kind that deals openly with difficult topics like self-harm. The reactions to the article’s assertions have been widespread and passionate. Readers and writers alike have responded at length, and lots more opinions and links to them, short and long, are to be found on Twitter filed under the #YASaves hashtag.

Having read the article, though, I found myself reacting most strongly to two specific passages that jumped out at me: and the reactions came on two different levels.

The first passage really annoys me as a former psychiatric professional:

“Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”

“Indeed, likely –”? I’m ready to be shown the clinical study that underlies and supports this statement. So sweeping a generalization has no business being made in a public forum without a solid underpinning of fact. What fact  I can bring to this issue is that in my time as a psychiatric nurse who worked with adolescent / young teenage patients, I never came across a single case that supports any aspect of the columnist’s opinion. If she can produce any evidence to reinforce her claim besides what I strongly suspect is wishful thinking, I’ll be glad to examine it and draw my own conclusions as to its validity.

But I really doubt there is any such data. And if (as I suspect) that conclusion just came out of the columnist’s head as a feeling or a theory, or was a vague summation of even vaguer third-person anecdotal material, I have one word for it: CODSWALLOP.

What I found while doing one-to-one therapy with adolescent patients is that to successfully start working through their problems, what they initially needed more than anything else was confirmation and acknowledgement from those around them that the problems existed in the first place – that they weren’t unique or alone in their situation, that other people knew about it and that it was real. Books dealing with the problem in question were and are often a useful tool to help that acknowledgement get started, and even (in some cases) in getting a patient past their own denial that they had any such difficulty at all.

When I was practicing, such books were often painfully dry and didactic, and I wish there’d been more young adult fiction available on such subjects… for fiction (especially when done well) tends to lecture less than nonfiction and is more likely to be successfully internalized because you’re hearing, not a dry recitation of fact, but someone’s voice. Young adult novels that deal honestly with such issues unquestionably have value for teens groping their way toward understanding of how to tackle their problems. They invite them into the dialogue: they make the troubled teen part of the solution. And at the very least, they let their readers know that they’re not alone. There are times when that knowledge is enough to mean the difference between life and death. Here, without any doubt whatever, YA really does save.

A side issue here: there are probably some who think I have no dog in this particular race, since my YA books are not known for dealing with edgy teen issues, and also have no explicit sex, not a lot of violence, and language not much stronger than the “crap” level. This is personal preference for me, a matter of style. But I support my colleagues who are working the grittier and more uncomfortable part of the young adult coalface, and I strongly dislike the casual, if not outright mischievous, mischaracterization of their works in the columnist’s article. She has done them a disservice, and owes them an apology… which unfortunately I doubt will be forthcoming.

So much for that. Now for the other statement, the one that got up my nose in my role as a former teenager:

It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person’s life between more and less desirable options.

…Oh really, now. Every other aspect? And not just distinctions, I bet, but decisions. So there are no areas in which the child or young adult can be considered competent to have his or her own opinions, and make his or her own choices, without having them vetted and pre-ratified by the ever-watchful parent? (Because from the WSJ article, you get a strong feeling that when Mommy Says No about, for example, a book — well, the poor young adult just gets to pull on his or her PJs and go to bed early: there’s no mechanism for appeal.)

I really hope that’s not what the columnist is suggesting, because I don’t know about the rest of you, but it sounds like Hell on earth to me. And that would not just be because I’m one of a generation who would have laughed out loud at the very idea of my parents organizing, for example, when (or if) I went out to play, or who or what I played with. In my spare time I went where I pleased, lay out in green fields for prolonged periods staring at the sky and doing nothing remotely “useful” or educational, adventured widely through my neighborhood unsupervised, climbed trees and fell out of them, stayed out after dark (having informed my mom that I’d be doing so), and had a secret place to go and read where I spent hours on end, with no need to account for my movements to anybody. To have somebody ruling yes/no on every aspect of my life until I was eighteen? There’s a word for that kind of life. It’s jail. (And some of you will probably recall J.R.R. Tolkien coming up with something similar in a discussion of the value of the literature of escape. “Who are the people most concerned with the possibility of escape?” he asked. “The jailers.”)

I do not accept that life for kids is all that much more dangerous than it was when I grew up. I just don’t. The difference between now and fifty years ago is that we now openly discuss the dangers that were often only whispered about half a century ago. Yes, the new millennium has thrown up many new and different threats to the concept of the peaceful and safe childhood (itself something of a construct, but that’s a subject for another post). But those threats and challenges ought to be met in some other way than locking the kids up in a virtual tower until they’re eighteen. The fairy tales (always a treasury of useful archetype) tell us straightforwardly what happens to such children.

Under no circumstances am I questioning a parent’s right or responsibility to protect his or her children from danger. But I do think we’re building the protective fences way too high. Unfortunately, the sensationalistic focus of mass media on unusual events like the kidnapping, abuse and/or murder of children has successfully exploited the increasingly anxious love and cynically fanned the fears of a whole generation of parents, until they genuinely think it right that everything about their children’s lives must be rigidly controlled until they are no longer legally responsible for them.  People who advocate some kind of return to common sense in these matters are practically condemned as the Antichrist. Freedom? That’s something a child will be allowed to experience only after it turns eighteen. Or maybe after it exits college at age twenty-one or thereabouts, and starts trying to find employment sufficient to pay off those pesky student loans. Until then, many North American parents are trapped in their role as frazzled, Argus-eyed controllers of their children’s mobility, their after-school activities, their diet, their access to money, their online activity, and a whole lot of their entertainment.**

Books, though, are revealing an interesting chink in this theoretically all-encompassing defense. Some parents are apparently beginning to find books scary because they’re not like the ones they read when they were kids… and because they understand from firsthand experience that books interact directly with the imagination in an essentially noncontrollable way that movies and TV and computer games do not. After all, when you sit down to watch a TV show or a movie with your child, you can at least verify that you’re being presented with the same imagery and deriving generally the same meanings from it. But you can’t be sure of that with a book: the reader does so much of the work in his or her own head. As a result, the hypercontrolling parents whose attitudes are reflected in the WSJ article sometimes seem to act as if they consider books to be a potential delivery system for some dangerous drug that will overwhelm their child’s defenseless mind. (The concept that the child might be able to stand aside from the book’s content and evaluate it independently before accepting or rejecting it is of course rejected out of hand.)

But I think this attitude is a pointer toward the underlying problem responsible for the article’s tone of righteous (and frightened) indignation. The presence of all these awful books on the market suggests that there must be a lot of young adults reading them – kids who are obviously out of the absolute control of their parents! (Horrors.) And this undeniable fact will surely provoke, in the hypercontrolling parent, a fear that their own defenseless child might possibly listen, not to the parent, but some book-pushing friend, and read one of these deadly objects… and the parent won’t be able to stop them from internalizing the contents. This will be due to a terrible truth that no hypercontrolling parent wants to face, but which books force them to confront more clearly than usual: Though so many other aspects of your child’s life can be controlled by you, the inside of your child’s mind is simply not one of them. With this unbearable admission, the hypercontrolling parent’s only daily certainty in their relationship with their children – the illusion of control – suddenly fades away.

And those of you who may have been children at one point or another will possibly remember another aspect of this truth (if you actually remember your childhood, and haven’t idealized it into a few frozen images. So much of this whole situation flows from people not remembering…) You know that if a child is absolutely focused on a parent not finding out about something, odds are good the parent never will. Let the parent have eyes like an Argus, they still won’t be able to keep their child under those eyes for every minute of the day. And Hermes, in his aspect as the wily patron god of untrammeled communications, is always lurking just around the corner: for if a child really wants to read something without this parent knowing it, he will find a way.

One of my parents tried to exercise the columnist’s style of control with me, at one point, way back when – trying to keep me from reading material “too old for me” and calling the local library to say that I wasn’t to have access to it. I was outraged, for I considered what I put into my brain in my spare time to be my business – my personal area of greatest freedom, and one I wasn’t going to give up for anybody. (I probably didn’t phrase this exactly this way, being nine at the time. But the above sentiment renders exactly how I felt.) The joke, though, was that I needn’t have wasted the outrage, because I quickly discovered for myself that there were simple ways around the silly parental prohibition (which I knew was silly because I knew what I was after – general knowledge, nothing salacious or evil).

Don’t get me wrong here. I’d have been delighted to discuss the whys and wherefores with the parent in question, so that we could work it out, they wouldn’t worry, and I wouldn’t have to hide what was going on. But it was imposed on me as a diktat, and all such attempts on my side to get some negotiation on the issue failed. So I gave up on what was plainly a wasted effort and got on with business… though I was still sad that my parent, even after all those years spent raising me, plainly didn’t know me very well at all. For the reading I was interested in doing, I simply took a bus to the next town over and used their library instead. They didn’t know about the “guidelines” my parent had issued to the home library, and the local library could report (if asked) that I was obeying the prohibition. Problem solved. (Was I guilty about deceiving my parent? Yes. For about five minutes. [Five minutes is a surprisingly long time when you’re nine.] Did my parent ever find out? No. Did I suffer any harm from it? Not in the slightest.)

The point is that now it would be way, way easier than that to game the parental system. You could make a case that books are the most easily concealed of all information technologies, and as technology continues to explode around us all, the situation just gets better for the clandestine reader. Besides libraries where your kid can read out of your sight, there are computers that don’t have NetNanny installed on them. There are other kids’ smartphones, left unlocked by parents not quite so controlling or paranoid. You think you’ve got your own kid’s phone locked down? What technology can limit, technology can defeat, and info on how to hack the protective apps on a phone, how to get around the parental-choice software on a laptop or a desktop PC, is common currency in every schoolyard, in newsgroups and online forums, on Facebook and in Tumblr and on Twitter and many other places. It passes in stealthily exchanged thumb drives, and jumps like lightning by text, in codes parents can’t understand, from phone to phone. Even that epitome of “safety” and supervision, the playdate, can be subverted if the kids know what they’re doing, and are careful about how they coordinate the manipulation of their parents. (It’s a choice irony that parents who have been manipulating every aspect of their kids’ lives for decades routinely have no idea where the kids have picked up the talent, and are horrified when it’s turned on them.)

It must be terrifying for the hypercontrolling parent to be jailer in so porous a prison. You have to feel for them.

…For about five minutes. If you’re a parent who’s become committed to such a role, you have only one hope of successfully discharging your “duty.” You must bribe or blandish or scare your prisoners into believing that your actions are either for their own good (that most horrifying of justifications, sometimes worst when genuine), or just too much trouble to fight. Otherwise you have no chance of maintaining any significant level of control. The minute the kids decide to stop cooperating, you’ve lost the game. But while you’re winning, you’re as much a prisoner of the regime as they are. And you’ll remain so until your children leave home – possibly ill-equipped, due to your actions, to be out on their own in this century – and you collapse, exhausted.

I think there is a way out of this trap. But it’s dangerous, and it flies in the face of too much of today’s unquestioned “wisdom” about childrearing. It involves building a genuine informed partnership with the resident child or young adult as regards reading material, with give and take on both sides; and a real attempt to put yourself into the other party’s head, instead of merely imposing sheer brute-force control (which will eventually fail).  It involves actually reading books that you’ve heard scary things about to find out if those things are true, before you start issuing reading fatwas.  And – scariest of all –  it involves standing up to other parents who will try to force you back into the role that they’ve succumbed to for the sake of being seen as a good parent, sometimes even when way down deep they’ve disagreed with it.

Of course it won’t be easy. As my mom used to say (I believe quoting the cookbook writer Peg Bracken), “For every pint of wine you drink in this life, you’ll drink a quart of vinegar.” While forging and implementing this agreement with your child, there will be screaming and yelling and carrying on, “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria,” and so forth ad infinitum. But if you stick it out and make the break, you and your child together will have a chance to experience a shared experience of literature that in retrospect will make both childhood and parenthood memorable.

And as the certainty sets in that your children are going to be all right – as they assert their ability to handle their own growing freedom, and you realize that you’ve clawed back at least one precious sector of yours — you will at last be able to sigh with relief and start shoving those sleepless eyes back into the peacock’s tail… right where they belong.


*Attn: romance-writing colleagues: I’m not taking a poke at you. It’s in Ovid. Apparently after a long warm thyme-scented Greek afternoon of sweet reed-piping and storytelling, the tale of Pan and Syrinx is what pushes Argus over the edge into Snore City.

**I have to add that most European parents I know from a quarter century’s life on this side of the water find the whole North American “helicopter parent” concept kind of bizarre: some use it as yet more evidence that a lot of my people need their heads felt. As a former head-feeler, I normally invoke possible conflict-of-interest issues and seek an excuse to either leave or order another pint.

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June 7, 2011
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CatsCompanions and familiarsEuropeKindleMedicine, nursing, health

"Cat Food Discount Weekend" at the DianeDuane.com ebook shop extended!

by Diane Duane April 18, 2011
Hills Prescription k/d

Secondary to a batch of emails and so forth from folks who weren’t able to take advantage of the below-described discount offer over the weekend, we’ve extended it one day. So the (revised) pertinent info appears below. (And thanks to everyone who’s participated so far!)

BTW: if you’ve purchased an ebook or ebooks and are having any kind of download problem, please leave a comment in the thread below and our tech lady will get back to you as quickly as possible. Apparently there were some problems with the server on Saturday that resulted in shop registration emails and / or emailed passwords being delayed. These problems seem to have resolved themselves, but we want to make sure everyone’s got what they paid for, or were able to get in and make their purchases in the first place.

Anyway, here’s what it’s all about. As of this past weekend we’ve nearly come to the end of the supply of special kidney-friendly cat food that the vet’s office sent home with Mr. Squeak after his hospital stay (he was being treated for what we now recognize as the late stages of feline renal failure). Now it’s time to start ordering the stuff in seriously, and jeezLouise is it expensive. Also, in our neck of the woods you have to order “prescription” cat foods in bulk from the distributor… which means a minimum of 48-unit cases. Still: it’s in a good cause.

So it’s time to have a sale at the DD.com ebook shop! We’re offering a 25%-off sale on all ebooks in the shop until Tuesday morning (0900 UTC), April 19th. BT

The discount offer includes:

  • Middle Kingdoms books and stories, such as —
    • The Door into Fire (in ePub and Kindle / .mobi editions)
    • The Door into Shadow (ePub and Kindle / .mobi)
    • The Door into Sunset (ePub and Kindle / .mobi)
    • The Middle Kingdoms Omnibus (ePub and Kindle / .mobi)
    • and Sirronde’s World 1: The Span in ePub (somehow or other we were missing a Kindle edition of SW 1 but it’s at this link now: use the dropdown menu on the order page and you’ll see it.) (Sirronde’s World 3 is a freebie, BTW.)
  • The standalone fantasy works published under the Badfort Press imprint, such as:
    • the novel Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (in ePub and Kindle / .mobi)
    • The new short story anthology Uptown Local and Other Interventions
  • And the Young Wizards International Editions. (Purchasers outside the US and Canada only, please!) Including:
    • So You Want to Be a Wizard (ePub and Kindle / .mobi)
    • Deep Wizardry (combined listing: both ePub and Kindle / .mobi available on the page. We’re reorganizing the listings so they all do this…)
    • High Wizardry (another combined listing)
    • Wizard’s Holiday (ePub and Kindle / .mobi)
    • A Wizard of Mars (ePub and Kindle / .mobi)

(For those interested: the other four books are still in production, but we expect to have them all up by mid-May.)

Not Particularly

To get your discount, all you need to do is enter the coupon code CATFOOD at the checkout page. This will deduct 25% from your final total. And for customers taking advantage of this offer: you can use the coupon TWICE over the course of the weekend if you want to.

So shop early and often! And thanks in advance to all of you who elect to assist us in what we hope will be a long battle with the prescription catfood wholesaler. 🙂

…And now it’s time for a gratuitous cat picture, showing the senior cat in healthier days. (BTW, if you want to see some more of Squeaky, click here to view a nice selection of photos of him at Flickr.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 18, 2011
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Medicine, nursing, healthTechnogeekery

Now this is interesting: a powered exoskeleton for paraplegics

by Diane Duane April 12, 2011

It ain’t cheap. But I wonder if this is one of those things we’re going to see come down in price as the affiliated technologies become cheaper, and as more people start using it. Assuming that they do…

ReWalk™ is a man-machine device where the user is actively involved and has control of all mobility functions, through unique control processes. Walking is controlled through subtle changes in center of gravity, stability and safety are secured by use of crutches. Participation in mobility control comes naturally and intuitively, and brings tangible health and emotional benefits. ReWalk™ is not just a vertical wheelchair – ReWalk™ restores the element of control over mobility so lacking for wheelchair users. As any wheelchair user can attest, life in a wheelchair carries a hefty healthcare price tag. Serious problems with the urinary, respiratory, cardiovascular and digestive systems are common, as well as osteoporosis, pressure sores and other afflictions.

By maintaining users upright on a daily basis, and exercising even paralyzed limbs in the course of movement, ReWalk™ alleviates many of the health-related problems associated with long-term wheelchair use. In addition to relieving suffering, this has a real impact on healthcare costs – cutting, and enabling both insurers and individuals to redirect funds to other avenues. Adoption of ReWalk™ by wheelchair users results in significant cost saving at both institutions and private homes. ReWalk™ makes standing devices, stair lifts, bed lifts, and other mobility assistance apparatus redundant. Similarly, ReWalk™ users don’t require expensive powered wheelchairs – or the oversize vehicles and devices required to handle them. With ReWalk™, users require only minimal additional mobility assistance – dramatically increasing independence together with cost saving on a yearly basis.

April 12, 2011
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CatsHome lifeIrelandMedicine, nursing, health

For those interested: Mr. Squeak is back from the vet hospital

by Diane Duane April 8, 2011

Squeaky practices the stink-eye

“Recovering at home,” I guess, is the best phrase to use. He looks a little peculiar, since they partially shaved both his forelegs — one for the first IV he was on, and the other to use when he (somehow or other) pulled the first cannula out. He’s been ambling around looking vague, or else sleeping a lot, and right now — today being an unusually nice day for Ireland, sunny and still — he’s sitting out in the back yard soaking up the sunshine.

…But “recovering” is kind of an optomistic usage here. Chronic renal failure is 100% fatal, eventually. It’s just a question now of how long “eventually” takes. Right now we have to give the medications Squeak is on enough time to kick in, and see whether they help his appetite (which right now is worryingly marginal) and his other symptoms. He’s drinking well enough, though not as much as he was when he was in crisis last week — which is a good thing. The question now becomes whether he’ll start feeling like eating enough to make some kind of improvement in his condition likely.

This is, finally, a quality-of-life issue. Squeak has always been a dignified cat, and there’s no point in depriving him of that dignity, especially at his advanced age, just for the sake of what might be only a few more months of life. I’m guessing that within a couple of weeks we’ll know whether there’s any point in continuing vet runs for blood work and so forth, or if it would be kinder for all concerned — especially our most senior puss — to ask our local vet to make one last house call.

Meanwhile, through all of this, work goes on. It ain’t easy. But thanks to everybody who’s tweeted or emailed to send support. (And thanks also to all those who picked up a subscription to The Big Meow, or a copy of the Uptown Local and Other Interventions anthology or something else from the ebook shop, to help with the vet bills. It’s seriously appreciated.)

April 8, 2011
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CatsHome lifeMedicine, nursing, health

Mr. Squeak: a bulletin for his fans

by Diane Duane April 4, 2011

Indignant sick kitty is indignant…

Just a quick thank-you to those who’ve tweeted and emailed over the weekend to ask how Squeaky is.

For the last few months he’d become increasingly subdued and lethargic at home. Initially we put this down to the aftereffects of a bitterly cold and snowy winter, during which he actively refused to go out very much, and to Squeak’s considerable age (he’s somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen years old). But when he also started losing weight over the last month and getting actively frail, we became a lot more concerned.

On Friday we got him to the best of the local veterinary practices in our area for a checkup and to have bloods drawn. When the results came in on Saturday morning, the vet called us and asked us to bring him in immediately for hospitalization, the diagnosis being chronic renal failure.

Squeaky’s spent the weekend on IVs, essentially having his kidneys flushed clean, being hydrated and stuffed full of steroids and various other medications, and being evaluated to see whether his renal disease can be managed through diet and medication or not. His condition has been improving — the vet told us today that when he was admitted “he’d let us do anything we wanted with him” but that now “his personality was coming out a lot more” — meaning, I strongly suspect, the part of his personality usually expressed with his claws when something happens that Mr. Squeak considers inconsistent with his dignity. Since he has only two teeth left, I suspect they aren’t that much of an issue. But even in his frail state he still has a skogkatt’s big catcher’s-mitt paws, and packs a wallop when he hits someone with them. Squeak’s padawan apprentice Mr. Goodman, having been on the receiving end of smacking from these weapons from a young age, still treats Squeak with great respect even though he outweighs Squeaky by 50%.

Anyway, the hospital is looking at being ready to release him to home care tomorrow sometime. In the short term Squeak will now need the expected special renal diet, and probably diuretics as well, and monthly injections of this and that to help metabolize the built-up toxins that his kidneys and liver are no longer capable of handling unassisted.

Only time will tell at this point how long the treatment will extend his life. Naturally we’re overjoyed that our old friend isn’t going to have to depart the household just yet. What the future will hold remains to be revealed (but then that’s the way things usually go anyway…). The only thing we can be sure about right now is the vet bills. (And for those of you who’ve been idly considering a subscription to The Big Meow, or picking up a copy of the Uptown Local and Other Interventions anthology ebook, or something else from the DianeDuane.com ebook shop, let me suggest that this would absolutely be the perfect moment for it.)

In any case, thanks again to all those who inquired about Squeaky’s health. We can’t wait to get him home.

April 4, 2011
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Cows buttering someone's heart valves
AnimationEuropeFeaturedFood, restaurants and cookingGraphic and plastic artsHumorMedicine, nursing, health

The past, buttered up

by Diane Duane March 23, 2011

About twenty years ago we were living in a different house in Ireland, and we had analog satellite rather than the digital that’s pretty much all there is here now. That analog system meant we had access to a lot of the satellite stations that broadcast “in the clear” from Germany.

I was just starting to study German then, and was watching a lot of TV on the main German stations – RTL1 & 2, ARD, ZDF, ProSieben, 3Sat, and the predecessor to what is now Sat.1* – to get a feel for the sound of the language.  There was some fascinating programming on these, especially late at night.

I no longer remember the circumstances in which I stumbled upon the show from which the video below was extracted. All I know is that as soon as I realized what I was looking at, I slapped a tape into the VCR and started recording. The show was a history of German television advertising, and it had wonderful things on it, some of them just eyewateringly strange.

One of these was the truly bizarre (by today’s standards) commercial that follows. Our good friend Torsten Dewi, aka Wortvogel, veteran German TV writer, film critic and (former) man-about-München, tells me that it was a blanket ad sponsored by a number of participants in the German dairy industry – sort of a German variant of the famous dairy-board-based  “Got Milk?” campaigns in the US, or similar campaigns for meats  (a la “Pork. The other white meat”).

But take a look at this. Warning: if your cholesterol is on the high side, you may need your medication after sitting through this thing. If you’re a cardiologist, you’d better brace yourself before you watch, as some of the things the characters in this animation are going to do will turn your brain right around in your skull. …A rhyming translation of the song that runs behind the action appears after the video. Unfortunately the video doesn’t display a full set of controls for some reason. You can pause it by clicking on it, then restart by clicking again.

(Note: the beginning of the video is from another commercial, featuring a young chef saying “It has to be easily digestible — like Overstolz (cigarettes) from the Rhine!” It’s there because I wanted to keep the music from the main part of the video in one piece. If like me you feel the urge to hide your eyes on seeing a head chef strolling around a food prep area and handing his staff packs of cigarettes, then look away for about five seconds.)

The song, in rough translation, goes something like this:

These days everyone’s insides are overloaded
With chow whose food value’s so corroded
that your insides and your guts get discommoded
and your cardio and liver get clogged up!

Nonetheless folks keep on shoving food inside ‘em
Until it’s almost calcified ‘em —
Then the innards to a sorry halt come slidin’
And the gall starts heading northward in a rush!

[spoken] So what gives with that donkey-clerk?
We need to get some cows to work!

— And we cut to the cows of Germany, chewing their cuds, and then swinging milk churns and dancing to Alpine zither music. They dance into the dairy, churn the butter by kicking the churns up to tumble in the air, and then start going through the rest of the production process. The cow doing the rough shaping of the butter blocks is using a pair of grooved wooden paddles which are still used in small dairies all over Europe for working butter (the English-language term for these is “Scotch hands”). These are used for squeezing the last vestiges of buttermilk out of the butter, and also for working in salt. – Another cow then helps with the packaging.

And now comes the Butter Propaganda. As the happy cows skip into the stylized human being and start buttering his heart valves and smearing his gall bladder with the stuff, the song resumes:

Kids, here’s what you have to know:
Back to nature you should go!
Butter’s the best cure, you know,
And this is why that’s true:

Butter cleans your stomach out,
Gives you energy without a doubt,
Helps the heart pump in and out,
‘Cause butter’s good for you!

(chorus)

Now, people, with butter
Things “go smooth as butter”,
The good stuff’s all in butter today:
But be careful, folks, ‘cause
The brand name’s important:
It’s German brand-name butter that’s okay!

No more kidney stones for you,
Upset nerves get quiet, too:
Butter ‘em up, they’ll calm right down –
That’s what you should do;

Butter sorts the liver out,
Makes the gall bladder grin and shout,
Good health is what it’s all about
With butter from the “coo”!

(chorus)

Now, people, with butter
Things “go smooth as butter”,
It makes your aches and pains go away:
But be careful, folks, for
The brand name’s important:
It’s German brand-name butter that’s okay!

About the above rendering of the song: Torsten kindly gave me a literal prose translation, which I’ve adapted.  Sometimes I’ve let the exact sense of the words go for the sake of a general effect, especially where the German can’t be even closely rendered into English in rhyme — the funktioniert / geschmiert / guarantiert combo after the first chorus  is a super internal rhyme, but really problematic when you try to translate it closely.

…There’s something to add to this in passing. More than one European dairy culture has the tradition that butter is somehow magical. Possibly this comes of ancient people’s confusion and/or admiration about the way something that started out cream suddenly becomes butter and buttermilk – similar to the sudden, seemingly magical changes that happen to dough or grape juice when yeast is added.  Also, butter is sometimes unpredictable, as bread and wine are – conditions have to be right for its making, or it can fail – so it gives the impression of being a living thing, something that has to be placated and coaxed (as in all those traditional buttermaking songs).

In these traditions, butter is often assumed to have mysterious powers in its own right. Butter neglected, disrespected or treated carelessly is susceptible to being stolen by witches or bringing down a curse on those who misuse it. However, butter churned on certain feast days or nights, especially in May, can protect humans and livestock from sickness and the evil eye, and cure all illnesses. The Irish saying “An rud nach leigheasann im ná uisce beatha níl aon leigheas air / What butter and whiskey won’t cure, there is no cure for…” has parallels in Switzerland and Austria, and the phrase “Butter is the best cure” in the song is a straightforward lift from an old German-language folk saying.  So it’s fascinating to see this material turn up here in a piece of straightforward advertising film from the middle of the twentieth century…

(And now I have to go try to get that butter song out of my head, where after all this post-editing it bids fair to be stuck for hours, if not days. Oh well.)


*I think I liked their old rainbow-sphere logo better. The new one looks like a peppermint ball.

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March 23, 2011
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ComicsMedicine, nursing, healthOnline life

I love "Polite Dissent"

by Diane Duane August 28, 2008

…for rigorous medicine applied to that often non-medically-rigorous venue, the comics. The most recent example, quoted at length (and there’s more at source — I trimmed it a little):

Dr. Koslowski (narrating): Dr. Singh decided to inject 5ccs of Adrenalin directly into the Joker’s heart. It was our only chance to save thousands of lives.

Adrenalin injectionInjecting medication directly into the heart, despite what you may have seen in Pulp Fiction, is not a good idea. It’s too easy to lacerate a coronary artery (causing a massive heart attack) or inject the medication into the heart muscle (causing a fatal arrhythmia). It’s not done anymore….

Dr. Koslowski: At which point the Joker flatlined.

So what does the medical team do? They defibrillate him.
Once again repeat after me: Do not shock a flatline. It is a bad idea. It may work in comic book (like it does here), but in real life it doesn’t work and may actually make the situation worse…

Once again, the Joker suffers a cardiac arrest . This time, Batman himself jabs the Joker in the heart with a syringe full of Adrenalin. The second time’s a charm and it works! The Joker returns to consciousness and promptly escapes…which was all part of Batman’s plan; he wanted to trick the Joker into leading him to the third bomb.

…Let’s count the medical errors in a mere eight pages: the Joker flatlines and is subsequently defibrillated, not to mention injected twice directly in the heart with an overdose of Adrenalin.

Note to self: Do not seek emergency medical care in Gotham City. Hold it until you reach Metropolis.

Heh heh. Go Scott!

Tags: Batman, medicine, Joker, Dark+Knight, comics
August 28, 2008
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HumorMedicine, nursing, healthOnline life

What to do about your chubby baby (NOT)

by Diane Duane August 25, 2008

Baby Bariatrics

(Gazelle milk, huh?) 

Tags: gazelle, milk, chubby, baby, bariatrics, spoof
August 25, 2008
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40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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