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a white tiger mauled and killed a zookeeper at a New Zealand wildlife park today.  inevitably, he was euthanized.  the park, which contains many endangered lions and tigers, said that it would provide counseling to its employees.  The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry reported last year that the animals at the park were kept in small, crowded, unsanitary enclosures, conditions so poor that officials considered having forty cats put down.  i think this is why zoos are no good.  wild animals belong in the wild.  they don’t belong in zoos or carnivals or in people’s houses being forced to wear diapers.  when animals are kept in zoos, zookeepers inevitably get too comfortable and put themselves in danger and get mauled and the animals lose their lives as a result.  also, as in this zoo, most of the time the facilities are inadequate and the animals live in squalid enclosures with improper diets and little bratty kids gawking and pointing and screaming at them all day.  it’s no life for an animal.  captive breeding is one thing but zoos, i think, are obsolete.  i don’t know what good comes of zoos, the only thing i can think of is the educational experience that visiting a zoo represents, perhaps inspiring efforts in wildlife and ecological conservation and potentially leading to careers in such fields.  but i think, especially today, these purposes can be realized through the internet, t.v., and other sources of media.  an african lion sleeping comfortably under a tree in the serengeti doesn’t want to be relocated to detroit any more than we do.  i say let’s leave the wild animals alone.  if we want to see them, we can buy expensive safari trips to take us by helicopter and jeep to their native habitats.  we can see them online and we can see them on the discovery channel and animal planet.  for every diapered chimapanzee i see on t.v. mauling some women and being gunned down on the street, i cry a little.  you should too.

i have this one biochemistry teacher, Dr. Pehrson.  Great guy.  Great teacher, too, he won the vet school teaching award last year.  He has Nobel Prize envy, though, it’s kind of sad.  We all feel bad for him.  He likes to keep his students informed of recent advances in science and research.  He also tells us about Nobel Prize winners and why they won and for some reason half of them started out in Dr. Pehrson’s lab before deciding to leave and join a different lab and subsequently winning the Nobel Prize.  These stories are interesting but ultimately sad and awkward.  Afterwards, all the students wish there was some way we could get Dr. Pehrson a Nobel Prize.  I looked into it and to nominate someone for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry you have to receive an official invitation form from the Nobel Committee.  People who usually receive this confidential form include members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, permanent and assistant professors of chemistry at the universities and institutes of technology of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, and holders of corresponding chairs in at least six universities or university colleges selected by the Academy of Sciences.  So if any of the Nobel Laureates reading this blog are looking for an intelligent, friendly, charming man with a sharp wardrobe and thick glasses to nominate for this year’s prize, I propose to you Dr. Pehrson.  Let’s give him an autobiographical story to share with his students.

a bunch of undergraduates next door are having a party.  since i can’t concentrate on studying, i thought it would be fun to keep a log of what i’m hearing.

11:13PM I hear loud talking but no one is saying anything interesting.  Sounds like vet school lectures.

11:15PM A loud cheer just erupted from the house.  I’m guessing a girl took her shirt off.

11:16PM Someone just screamed, “Go home!  Go home!”  Fight!  Fight! Fight!

11:16PM A couple seconds of silence are followed by everyone singing happy birthday.  I think people got so drunk that they thought they were at a birthday party.

11:19PM Things got really quiet, and then I started to smell burning.  A bonfire, undoubtedly.  Kids are dumb.

11:20PM Everyone has come together to sing along in unison to a Backstreet Boys song.  I guess it could be worse.  The actual Backstreet Boys could be at the party singing.

11:24PM I just heard a few people scream “Do it!  Do it!”  Without knowing exactly what’s going on, I think it’s a safe assumption that either someone is about to eat some kind of bug or we’ve entered the orgy portion of the gathering.

11:27PM I hear the approaching sirens of a police car, followed by the music being turned off.  Perhaps it will be an early night.

11:42PM The music is back on.  Nuts.

11:47PM Everybody is cheering and laughing and clapping.  You have to hand it to young, drunk people.  Even amidst today’s turmoil, they sure know how to put on a brave face and have fun by screaming life buffoons.  So they have that going for them, which is nice.

12:13AM Didn’t think I’d remember to switch to AM, huh?  Things have seemed to mellow, save for a few kids screaming gibberish to each other.

12:15AM  A few kids of gone outside to talk.  These kids are the cool kids, separating themselves from the partying idiots to enjoy some quiet time.  For the first few hours of a party, it’s cool to be at the party, get drunk, dance, and be loud.  But at a certain point, the party stops being cool.  The cool kids can sense exactly when a party stops being cool and effectively distance themselves from their lesser counterparts by either excusing themselves to go upstairs and have sex or alternatively going outside to smoke or enjoy the cool breeze of nightfall.  The slightly less cool kids stay an hour too long and the kids that are not cool at all are the ones that usually get arrested when the cops come back.  At least that’s my take on parties.

12:25AM  I think the party is dying down.  No one has screamed anything stupid in a few minutes.

10:09AM Things are nice and quiet.  I bet the house is filled with a lot of people hung over, a few kids waking up next to the toilet, perhaps someone slept in the bathtub, a few people waking up in bed together wondering if they did it, and some guy waking up in the frontyard with raccoon feces all over him.  A party well done.  See you guys next Friday.

i think more and more there’s kind of a trend these days to annoint something or someone the best ever.  maybe it started with the comic book guy on the simpsons proclaiming everything worst ___ ever.  but maybe, and i think more likely, we’re all just a little full of ourselves.  i notice this especially in sports, where tiger is the best golfer ever, federer is the best tennis player ever, and kobe is better then mj.  really?  i think tiger probably is the best ever, but no one else is.  no movie or book that came out recently was the best ever.  this is not the best era ever.  that honor, of course, goes to the stone age, where they invented all kinds of brilliant things, from the club to the bear-skin coverall to fire to the sexy, scruffy look to all those cars that you had to pedal with your feet like the one fred flinstone drove.  what exactly have we invented recently?  easier-to-use jar openers.  slightly more efficient gardening tools.  t-shirts with sayings that are funny the first time you wear them.  are we so misguided as to think that everything going on now is better than anything that went on in the past and anything that will go on in the future?  we must be idiots.  i think this current time period will be remembered for everybody becoming extremely fat and losing their money and freaking out followed by electing our first black president followed by everybody calling themselves noble and courageous for electing a black man president and that’s about it.  there’s a new bond now, harry potter is older and awkwardly hormonal but still comes around every summer, batman is cool again, vin diesel still makes fast and furious movies, and eddie murphy is somehow still getting work.  i think times now are unremarkable and we should all accept it.  great things have happened in the past and will happen again in the future but not right now.  sit back and relax, people, seek comfort in mediocrity.  yes, every group needs a leader, but that leader needs a bunch of submissive sheep to appreciate him and tell him he’s great.  our era just happens to be a sheep.  so what.  i don’t see any einsteins when i walk down the street.  we just got dealt a nothing hand.  let’s just fold.  it’s better than bluffing our way to the final hand and then looking like idiots when we have a pair of two.

remember in the shawshank redemption when brooks left and then killed himself because he didn’t know what to do with himself in the real world after so long in prison?  morgan freeman said something like, ‘he’s just institutionalized, that’s all.’  and that’s how morgan freeman paved his career as a narrator.  people thought that movie was good because morgan freeman narrated it.  whether that was true or not (it was not), freeman, from that point on, was hired for any movie requiring narration.  but i fear for myself.  and my classmates.  after twelve years of grade school and four years of college and four years of graduate school, what’s going to happen when we graduate?  will half of us take bagging jobs at the local grocery store, be rebuked for forgetting to double bag, carve our names in our apartments, and hang ourselves?  it’s something i worry about.  what’s it going to be like not having to wake up early or stay up late?  it seems like it would be great.  but all those poor souls at shawshank thought it would be great.  and you know where they are?  dead.

candy

one thing that never gets old is candy.  i like candy as much today as i did when i was three.  i remember telling my friends at the time that if i ever stopped liking candy, they had my approval to murder me.  they took down my information, stored it safely in their respective wallets, and we went our separate ways, hoping to never have to meet again, for that would spell my death.  by them.  so shortly thereafter, i began my quest to find a new group of friends, a goal which, at time of publishing, remains unfulfilled.  what amazes me about candy is that they come up with new candy ideas pretty much every week, churning out different shapes, consistencies, flavors combinations, and rarely producing an unsatisfactory product.  while we struggle to generate new classes of anthelmintics and antibiotics, while cancer research remains stagnant, while soda innovation is underwhelming and often disgusting, the geniuses of our country apparently all work in candy development.  candy rose to prominence in 1995, when a nationwide poll captured not only our interest but our hearts.  we chose blue, the new M&M color, replacing tan, which Mars Inc. decided was boring and racist.  tan had replaced violet in 1949, when Mars Inc. determined that violet propagated homophobia and was “not the message we want to send to our customers and teach our children.  American schoolboys should not have to absorb the verbal and physical abuse and accusations that accompany eating the violet M&Ms.”  America was involved in the creation of a new product, M&Ms with blue, and the love affair began.  since then, regrettably, candy creation has taken a back seat to more sensational subjects, such as war, combat, militia movements, warfare, terrorism, military activity, and epic war movies.  but Americans have been lucky enough to enjoy the new candy coming our way behind the scenes, revelations such as pull-and-peel twizzlers, gummy life savers, peanut butter twix, and swedish fish aqualife.  sometimes i think that candy is delicious and thus it would be difficult to screw up such a good thing.  but then i think of soda and the numerous missteps in new soda concoctions.  terrible, all of them.  the only thing the egg heads designing soda have come up with recently is mixing cherry and vanilla.  great job, guys.  inspired.  just today i saw a commercial for crazy core skittles.  i have no idea what that means.  but it’s very exciting and, more than likely, a great new candy invention.  keep up the good work, guys.  even it today’s tough economic climate, we, as Americans, are proud to fork over what little money we have for your delicious new candy.  a grateful nation salutes you.

human medicine vs. veterinary medicine

in veterinary medicine, you have two relationships that you must forge in the examination room; one with the animal, and one with the owner.  in human medicine, there are also two relationships to keep in mind; one with the patient, and one with his insurance carrier.  in veterinary school, you study the importance of biosecurity and the public health concerns of emerging infectious diseases.  in medical school, apparently they do not, because most physicians don’t know what zoonosis means.  there have been many cases in which veterinarians trying to treat large, unwieldy, aggressive mammals have lost their lives in the line of duty.  to date, a doctor has not so much as contracted the sniffles from a patient.  one guy thought he got sick from a patient once, took the rest of the week off, laid in bed the whole time.  eventually it came out that he faked the whole thing and just wanted a week of vacation.  then they told him that he was a doctor and could take vacation whenever he wanted for as long as he wanted and he was never heard from again.  lots of kids dream of becoming veterinarians when they grow up.  or athletes.  or astronauts, or actors, or firemen, or pilots.  that is all.  a vet student training in the field is at risk for afflictions such as cryptosporidiosis, salmonellosis, and echinococcosis.  a med student in training is at risk for vicious paper cuts, including the kind that start to bleed.  in veterinary medicine, different breeds of dogs are differentially predisposed to various ailments, both genetically and behaviorally.  in human medicine, a fat guy is more prone to heart disease, whereas a thin guy can buy an oversized pair of pants and sell submarine sandwiches on t.v.  humans keeping other humans in their custody against their will is called kidnapping.  humans keeping animals in their custody against their will is called cat ownership.  physicians who specialize learn more and more about less and less, so that they eventually know everything about nothing.  veterinarians who generalize learn less and less about more and more, so that they eventually know nothing about everything.  human doctors drive mercedes and think they are the shit.  vets drive station wagons with their dogs in the back seat and think they smell shit.  animals are furry, friendly, happy, energetic, sweet, and silly.  people are mean and old.  physicians think they’re brilliant and are convinced that they could do the work of veterinarians with little problem.  veterinarians would like to see them try.

troup school

in third grade our school formed a relationship with an inner city school in New Haven named Troup School.  i don’t really know what brought this about or why, but i think it was so that we would learn how to interact with African-American children. this experience was advertised to us as an opportunity to make friends and colleagues for life, people with whom to share our experiences in elementary school.  when the students from Troup School arrived, we assembled into our assigned groups and sat uncomfortably at our tables, awaiting further instruction.  it was very awkward that first day, as anytime kids meet other kids they are invariably shy and uneasy.  we basically just sat together, wishing the teachers would intervene or that it would be time for them to go.  for some reason the teachers expected us to jump into discussion as if we were close friends with strong conversational skills.  perhaps a spirited discussion on the subject of civil rights.  maybe a heated debate on the pros and cons of affirmative action.  but we were kids.   we looked down, we looked up, we looked at the clock, we looked at each other, we looked at the teacher.  it was rather uncomforable and we didn’t know why the teachers weren’t doing anything.  eventually, seeing their best laid plans sputtering, the teachers finally handed out worksheets for us all to complete in our groups.  the time passed.  for our second meeting, we went to visit troup school.  the day before going, we all practiced for the trip.  one person would ask, “Where are weeeee?”,  and the next kid would answer, “Troup School, sir!” and salute.  i think it was pretty funny for something a bunch of 8 year-olds came up with.  so we made our trip and took a tour of their school and did some random arts and crafts stuff in our groups and then came home.  we had a few more such meetings and then for some reason this Troup School fad waned and we never heard anything about it again.  perhaps the teachers thought we had successfully learned how to interact with a race other than our own and that was that.  perhaps the folks at Troup School had had enough of our rich snobbery.  whatever the reason, it was a short-lived but long-remembered experience.  for years afterward, we would randomly come up to one another in class and demand “Where are weeeee?”

•again today, driving on the highway i saw an ambulance with its lights flashing.  i don’t really know how to react to this.  i don’t remember being taught a highway ambulance protocol.  i could slow down or pull over but if the car behind me doesn’t follow suit, it could get ugly.  another problem is that ambulances on the highway drive slowly, like around 50.  it makes sense, as they probably don’t want the patient to flop around too much back there.  i think maybe instead of showing us all those after-school specials on drunk driving in driving school, they could’ve taught us more practical things, like what to do when there’s a slow-moving ambulance on the highway, how to get back at someone who cut you off, how long to wait after passing a hidden police car before speeding up, whether it’s okay to pass a police car on the highway, whether it’s better to drive drunk or to let your twelve year-old drowsy son drive home.  one thing i think we all dutifully learned in driving school was that if you drive a porsche and drive drunk, you will always be involved in a horrific accident, whereas if you drive a mazda miata, obey the speed limit, and always wear a freshly ironed shirt, you will never get into an accident ever.  also in driving school there would be those multiple choice quizzes that we had to read aloud and answer in front of everyone, and you always got to the one guy who couldn’t really read and everybody laughed at him and it annoyed you so much that you wanted to stick up for him and tell them to shut up, but you could read fine and didn’t want to be associated with the kid who couldn’t, so you didn’t say anything.

•another thing i like is when people use the phrase ‘you do the math’ when it doesn’t apply.  like a pittsburgh steeler fan will come up to you and say something like, “the steelers are the greatest, they’ve now won five super bowls, that’s more than anyone else, you do the math.”  what math?  there’s no math to do, unless you’re asking me to crunch the numbers to confirm that five is still greater than four and that five equals five, which, in fact, it does.

•i don’t think the steel dividers between the urinals in public bathrooms really do much.  i think they either need to go from the ceiling to the ground or else not be there at all.  you know what the two feet tall steel dividers are saying?  they’re saying, “we want to give you the impression that we care about your bathroom concerns but we’re too cheap to offer the privacy that you require.  also, don’t pee on those dividers, the steel is not stainless.  just kidding.  please pee in the urinal.”

•march madness is about to begin.  can you feel the excitement?  march madness is like taxes is like halloween.  it’s that event that comes around once a year that you don’t think about at all until it’s there, but when it’s there it is a very big deal and takes over your life.  i don’t quite know what’s so special about march madness.  but i do know this;  if i lived in the middle of nowhere and had one chance in my life to travel around the country and be on t.v. and act like a hooligan before returning to my hometown to spend my life working at a gas station and eating lunch at the same diner across the street every day, i would most certainly come up with a systematic order of ordering so as to maximize the number of days between eating the same meal.  but i would come up with some gimmicks to make it more fun, like “French Fry Friday”, or “Pancake Month”.

rode through a car wash today.  i think it’s safe to add enjoying a car wash to the list of activities that are not as fun once you grow up.  it’s a long list now, at least for me, including things like yo-yos, balloon animals, spontaneously stripping off all clothing at the sight of any sprinkler, randomly running around screaming, ice cream trucks, making fun of nerds.  but it’s not all bad, there are enjoyable occupations that one adds to his arsenal as he grows up, like enjoying a fine wine, wearing a new pair of socks, finding that parking spot outside your apartment, watching serious movies, having a satisfying conversation about anthony hopkins with an employee in the entertainment section of walmart, revisiting a childhood memory and feeling weird.  it’s weird, though, the moment you realize that you’re not enjoying something you used to love.  i played candy land a year and a half ago.  hated it.  i think maybe we don’t age second by second but we age in spurts.  like a moment of nostalgia ages us a year.  that’s one reason i don’t go to school reunions.  another is that they’re terribly awkward.  hi, how are you?  good, good.  aren’t you that guy who used to stare at me weirdly in biology?  no, no, i sat behind him.  i liked your hot friend.  oh, she died.  oh, that’s terrible.  OD’d?  no, no fugu.  that’s a shame.  well, what do you do now?  i’m an engineer.  that’s great, sounds interesting.  and you?  i just got laid off.  oh, that’s terrible, i’m so sorry.  yeah, thanks, it’s been rough, hey do you want to get out of here, maybe go to my place for some drinks?  <long pause>  well i’m sorry to hear about your job.  yeah, yeah, thanks.  well, i should go, i have to get up early.  yeah, no, definitely, me too.  awkwardness probably also ages you.  unpleasantness, in general.  they say smiling keeps you alive.  laughter is the best medicine.  i think finding things you did as a child that you still enjoy keeps you young.  chocolate is still delicious.  so is ice cream and pizza.  four square will always be fun.  girls will always have cooties and the kid who picks his nose and eats it should always be ostracized and ridiculed.  find these activites and beliefs that you had when you were little and protect them with your life.  they hold your life.  for every new big word you learn, you age.  and for every time you threaten someone with “you do, you die”, invite a friend over for video games, or buy a batman lunchbox not because it’s silly or vintage but because it’s cool, you stay young.  and the younger you stay, the more tragic it will seem when you die.