The Resurrection of Paper Bird

And then a shaft of light spread the sky. Paper Bird descended on a cloud. The whole heavens were resplendent with singing, the lambs danced in the fields, and the sick of DHMC stood up and were healed.

So was the second coming of Paper Bird. This last week I returned to my daily stair well to find him hanging out atop one of the stair cases resting on a hand rail. No mural can hold him back now. He sits where he wants to sit. He's Paper Bird.

I'm not sure where he disappeared to for a few weeks -- maybe flew south to Conneticut? -- but I am happy he's back. Paper Bird, don't you ever leave me again. Hurray for Paper Bird!



In other news. Back in November it was 11/11/11 at 11:11. We had a party at work. I took a photo that I wanted to share:

Not to be discouraged I quickly shot off another one:

What's perhaps more sad is my staff -- who also wanted to snap a screen shot full of 11's -- wasn't even paying attention when it passed, and my resident on service took a picture at the right time, but had the date displayed as November 11, 2011. What an amateur.

Needless to say it was the failure of the century.

Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time

This Christmas there were no children. In that respect it was sad.

This Christmas, however, there were zombies. And in that respect it was awesome.

All I want to talk about are the zombies.

The board game, Last Night on Earth, is a relatively complex game based around the relatively simple concept of brain eating zombies wanting to eat your brains. You can either be the brain possessing heroes or the brain craving zombies. The heroes have the advantage of various guns, clubs, and special traits while the zombies have the advantage of being numberless and relentless.

Round 1. Team Hero: Adam/Ellen. Team Zombie: Scooter/Ashlee.
The first game was a disaster for the zombies of their own design. The goal for the heroes was simply: kill a lot of zombies. The goal for the zombies was simply: eat some brains and don't get killed too much. And the zombies did quite well at first eating their first brain only two or three turns in. Worried that the heroes were holing up at the police station setting up a rowdy defense the zombies then decided upon the unorthodox plan of a strategic retreat thinking that time would run down before the heroes could kill enough of them to win then game. It turns out zombies don't usually run away because zombies aren't very good at it. The game ended when after the heroes loaded up on a variety of weapons the zombies didn't know existed they then proceeded to hunt down and execute a sufficient number of the poor, defenseless fleeing undead to declare victory. It was mass zombicide; war crimes were committed. 


Round 2. Team Hero: Scooter and Ashlee. Team Zombie: Adam.
Second game involved finding gasoline and a fire source to burn out all the zombie spawning points. The heroes for whatever reason spent most their time collecting awesome weapons, however, and eventually the time ran out. It turns out gasoline is a little hard to find in a run down, zombie infested wasteland, and it doesn't help when the zombies proactively guard the gas station. Make up your minds zombies: do you want brains or petrol?


Round 3. Team Hero: Adam and Ashlee. Team Zombie: Scooter.
The objective of the third round was to escape in the truck after finding the keys and some gas. Despite finding both practically strapped with a bow wrapped tightly around their faces the heroes still had a difficult time getting all the gear to the truck. The zombies succeeded in eating a number of the heroes, but this coincidentally led to their undoing because it turns out for every human you eat another one rises up in its place. Or more exactly in the middle of the game board right where the blasted truck is. Despite their being a dozen zombies on the truck with them -- and the corpses of a few of their friends -- the heroes managed to make it out of town at the very last moment.



Round 4. Team Hero: Scooter and Ashlee. Team Zombie: Adam.
Last game all the heroes needed to do was find four towns folk and then hustle their butts out of town. They performed swimmingly. They all quickly bound together at the gun shop, loaded up on weapons and obscene amounts of dynamite that no one had previously known were available, and then proceeded to blow the every loving bejeesus out of the zombies. Along the way they quickly collected their needed townsfolk and simply waited for dawn when they'd all stroll casually out of town leaving the city nothing but a smoldering crater of zombie parts. Unfortunately it turns out the zombies had the trump card of trump cards and the very last turn played it resulting in one of the four townsfolk running off to join the circus or some garbage like that thus leading to zombie victory. Stupid, dirty, cheating zombies.



Just so my Christmas story isn't entirely about the evil reanimation of the dead, let me say that we also went to a terrible Christmas carol opera in San Francisco and then ate a month's worth of chocolate at Ghirardellis. It's what baby Jesus would have wanted.  


It's toe lickin' time!

My World for Two Box TVs

Those six words have likely never been said before. Certainly not in New Hampshire.

For the better part of two months I have been trying in vein to rid myself of two box televisions. They are fully functional and without much in the way of scuffs or dings so I thought surely someone would want them. Surely?

Surely not. Even though buying such a television would have cost a good chunk of change just a year or so ago at any Walmart or Target, with flat screens being the only thing any self-respecting American will have in their home these days I may as well have been trying to give away anthrax or a swift kick to the nuts. 

None of my friends wanted them for free. No one on Craigslist wanted them for $10 or $20. None of the local thrift stores were interested. Even the local school district wanted nothing to do with them. They instead offered some box TVs of their own they wanted to get rid of! Argh, I'd rather have anthrax.

So I did what anyone would do in my situation. I took them out into the parking lot, doused them in lighter fluid, and set them on fire. I know of no other way to properly dispose of a television.

Actually I took them to Best Buy to get them recycled, but considering no one charged me the requisite $10 a television to recycle them I'm pretty sure they just took them back to the loading dock, doused them in lighter fluid, and set them on fire.

Happy New Year!

The Death of Paper Bird

Dartmouth Hitchcock Memorial Hospital is a classy hospital. Between the pianos, artwork, gardens, more pianos, and periodic impromptu classical guitar concerts some would say it's the classiest of hospitals. It's so classy in fact that the class spills over into the stairwells. And that's where I first met Paper Bird.

In most if all not all stairwells the walls are lined with murals on most if not all floors. They are idyllic paintings of the native wildlife and pastoral farms of New England. Some are beautiful, some are clearly done by volunteers. For the first few weeks of work I enjoyed looking at them while running around the clinics and wards, but I didn't pay them much attention as I usually had places to go and Lyme disease to stomp out. One day, however, while walking up the same daily flight of stairs I always hike upon arrival I noticed something was different. A bluejay seemed to be out of place. No longer perched atop a picnic table, it was now sitting comfortably on a nearby collection of pumpkins. Or maybe I was just crazy -- probably too much chronic brain Lyme. The next day, however, my suspicions were confirmed when while again walking into work I noted that the bluejay was no longer perched above the pumpkins but now sitting outside the picture frame entirely, resting immediately above the upper right border of the painting. Clearly I wasn't crazy, the bluejay was alive!

Shortly I found out that, no, the bluejay was in fact not alive, but rather made entirely of tape when I discovered him one day lying flat on the ground and being, well, composed entirely of tape. He had fallen from his roost atop the painting and was now resting face down on the floor, lying in his own filth. It was very sad; a dark day for Paper Bird. Thankfully the following morning he resurrected and for the next few months led a good life sticking to the various walls of the various murals, sometimes sitting on picnic table, sometimes atop one of the gratuitously placed pumpkins, once hanging upside down like a bat from a branch in a tree. It was always a pleasure seeing Paper Bird and where he'd be sitting that particular day. Life was good for the both of us. Then, one day, he disappeared.

Although no one knows where he disappeared off to -- some believe he flew off to paper bird heaven -- it is understood that he will not be coming back. By most paper bird standards he had a good life. The average life expectancy of a paper bird is only two and a half months and most paper birds are born into relative poverty forced to adorn pediatric clinic offices and elementary schools to earn a working wage. Paper Bird on the other hand got to, well, sit on pumpkins. I'll never forget his permanent paper smile or... I guess mostly just that. He was a paper bird, and for that we'll miss him. Goodbye Paper Bird!

Memorial services will be held in Auditorium D after the holiday break.

Your GPS Cannot Save You Now

Scene: Small country store and gas station in Eastern Vermont at 7 o'clock in the evening. My friends and I have been looking for a local ski area where presentations and pie would be dispensed on the subject of community ski areas in the northeast. Going off of instructions that basically stated drive to a fork in the road, bend right, and go 9.5 miles we, not surprisingly, are now lost. I pull open the dusty, metal front door immediately across from the only two rusty gasoline pumps to find no one behind the counter but four men idly resting adjacent to it doing nothing in particular.

Me: Y'all know where the Northeast Slopes is at?

Young guy in cap: Northeast Slopes?

Old man standing: Northeast Slopes in Cooksville.

Old man sitting: *Gibberish.*

Me: Cooksville?

Old man standing: Yeah, you know where Cooksville's at?

Old man sitting: *More gibberish.*

Young guy in cap: Yeah you go right down the highway....

Me: Right? That way or that way? *Pointing to my right and left.*

Young guy in cap: Right that away. *Point to his right and my left.* You go about... oh three miles...

Old man standing: 3.4 miles.

Young guy in cap: 3.4 miles till you get to the first road running off to the left.

Middle aged guy in overalls: Ain't it the second left?

Old man standing: Well the first left's right out of town and it's not really a left, more of a switchback in the other direction....

Young guy in cap: Well it's your first real left just past Marty's Auto Repair shop so look for that. Called Brook road.

Old man standing: Right.

Young guy in cap: You turn left past Marty's and you'll start going up hill for three or four miles. The road will twist and turn a lot and there'll be a lot of little roads going off to the right, but the right you want is about four miles down and it crosses a bridge. You cross that bridge.

Me: Okay. Left after Marty's. Go uphill about three or four miles. Take the right across the bridge.

Young guy in cap: Yep. Then you'll drive about another mile past a dairy and a farm and you'll reach Cooksville. Go the town hall in Cooksville and it's right across the road. That's where the Northeast Slopes meetin's at.

Me: *I reiterate the instructions, thank them, and turn to leave.*

Young guy in cap: *reiterates the exact same instructions and agrees.*

Old man standing: *chuckling* Good luck!

All: *laugh as if its the funniest thing they've ever heard.*

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, their instructions were entirely correct. Marty's garage, the bridge on the right, the dairy about a mile down the road; all were where they should be. We arrived just in time to hear about the lost ski areas of Vermont and just in time for coffee and pie. This was followed of course by a pie auction where the big winner sold for $18.50 and the biggest loser for $8.00. Just another crazy Friday night in New Hampshire.

More C4

The real test of a medical unit's combat readiness comes not in their mock platoon marches or field training exercises nor in their mastering of the Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) classes. It doesn't come in the twenty-four hour hutment confinement due to training being cancelled on account of freak San Antonio snow. It's not even whether they can go to the communal showers and strip naked and wash and rinse all while avoiding prolonged eye contact next to one another which successfully tells whether they can successfully carry stretchers through mine fields together. The real test of a real unit full of real men comes in the commode.

An Army Strong platoon in today's Army of One can sit down, relax, and watch each other go number two. That's the short of it. That's the test of a unit's combat grit. And in light of that profound military truth, we, collectively, failed. The test as it was ingeniously crafted comes from the bathroom's design as all the stalls, which are for whatever reason already spaced unusually tightly together giving you little in the way of elbow room, were, to perhaps make you forget you had nowhere to place your elbows, also freakishly close to the opposing row of stalls immediately across the way. And lest you pause to think too long about the fact that you could probably touch knees with the guy across from you were he to be a particularly tall individual, you realize that in fact you could touch his knees -- and perhaps gently caress them -- because there are no doors to any of the stalls. There is nothing but open space seperating you from the guy and white cinder block walls of the toilet across from you. A real hero -- I believe the Army was suggesting -- will sit across from his battle buddy, stare him deeply in the eye, and engage in friendly banter while taking a dump. He may even whistle a patriotic tune. Discuss the latest tourniquet application techniques maybe. Thumb wrestle. Whatever exactly is supposed to take place while two dudes respectively sit across from each other in a race to finish their business first, the end result is inevitably a crisp salute and a new level of unit cohesiveness.

Finding this to be the worse of two options were the other option to be small bowel obstruction followed by colonic perforation from never using the restroom again, we collectively came to an unspoken modus operandi. As there were four stalls in each row of the livestock pen the first person would use one of the stalls closest to the far wall while the next person would use the stall furthest from the far wall. Each successive soldier could use neighboring stalls if facing the same direction and feeling friendly, but this was known to be discouraged. Under no conditions was it acceptable to sit immediately across or immediately diagonal to another toilet user, and it was punishable by death if you accidentally sat on someone else's lap. If you were to arrive and find the maximum occupancy of four out of eight stalls in use you would politely return later, you didn't need to go that bad. If you did need to go that bad, congratulations you now know four people who hate your guts. In the end it proved successful -- I never had to watch what God never intended for us to watch -- but our esprit de corps suffered as we lacked that I've-seen-you-poo level of commitment that only veteran, battle tested units ever possess. We may have technically passed the training but we failed each other. C4's most dangerous landmines were truthfully not the literal landmines but the I-don't-want-you-looking-at-me-like-that landmines deep inside ourselves.

We were then forced to do jumping jacks in gas masks and hazmat suits, which -- coincidentally -- is a good way to induce fainting and general claustrophobia-related freaking out.

They're Practically Giving It Away!

It's time to get tough on aid.

Every year the United States hands out billions, probably trillions, of dollars freely to whoever asks for it. Want some cash, Greece? How's $25 billion sound? Need to build something, Morocco? Build a thousand of 'em, here's a million. Got problems, Nepal? Oh yeah don't we all, let's see what forty mill will do for ya. Surprise me. It is a well known fact that the US spends, like, what, at least 10% of our federal budget on foreign aid every year? Maybe even 20 or 30%, I don't know. It's just probably a lot. And what do we get for it? Nothing but nothing. It's time America got what's hers.

That's why I'm happy the GOP presidential candidates are finally standing up for fiscal responsibility. I appreciated it when Rick Perry stated that every year the foreign aid budget would start at $0. And I loved it when Bachmann demanded a song and dance from every ambassador requesting assistance while she would use the ambassador's attache as a foot stool. Gingrich's statement that he would respond to every aid request with, "explain to me why I should give you a single m---- f----- penny," was the kind of frank diplomacy we need in the world. That's always been the whole problem. We just give these guys a blank check, have them fill in the zeros, and then never talk to them again until the following year's aid dispensation party.

It would be one thing if these countries helped us out by, like, assisting with our antiterrorism efforts or making peace deals and cooperating with Israel, or even if doing good deeds like eradicating infectious disease was still it's own reward, but that's not happening and it's not. Pakistan hasn't arrested a single terrorist and I'm pretty sure their army and the Taliban probably totally hang out and watch cricket together on the weekend all the time. Plus as Senator Santorum pointed out, "if we solve all the world's problems then they'll never learn to solve them themselves. As the saying goes: If you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish he'll eat for a lifetime. And then cripple your domestic fishing industry so we probably shouldn't do that either." Plus it's not like the world's got a monopoly on poverty. I only make $32,000 a year breaking my back, putting in long hours. I don't even take all my sick days! I know as an American what's poor here ain't poor everywhere, but I bet that's not too far from the global average. I imagine I could kick back and watch a game with some dude in Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan while we share a few Buds.

Diplomacy isn't easy, but it ain't rocket science. Until we can get everyone to finally start wearing their "friend" and "enemy" badges liked we've asked -- and get them to stop trading the damn things around -- we should at the very least demand an accounting for our charity. And a return on investment. With a nice letter of thanks. And maybe a gift basket. Containing the hand written thank you notes of children and the drilling rights to offshore oil deposits. Just a small token of appreciation with cash value equal to or greater than that which we have so freely given.


In other news, despite the American public's perception that around 25% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid in fact only about 1% ($37 billion FY 2010) does which is less than the approximately 5% ($185 billion FY 2010) of the federal budget spent annually on national debt interest. Although a little over $1.5 billion went to Egypt last year, $4.2 billion was spent on assistance for refugee populations and $9.8 billion was spent on the President's Global Health Initiative started by former President Bush to help combat HIV and other infectious diseases in developing nations. The median US income in 2007 was $25,076 and placed one in the top 10% of global wage earners. Justin Bieber is set to marry Kim Kardashian in next year's wedding of the century.