The Captain's Table

Tee Many Martoonis? Dr. Tiina P Check In!

Once again it's time for an update of one of my favorite features here at The Captain's Table - another report from the front lines of nephrology from Dr. Tiina P. Today's report concerns Tiina's work with a research program on homeless alcoholics in my home town of Ottawa! To think if I'd only stayed there I too could be enjoying one of the following tasty cocktails...

But, of course, to understand what the hell I'm talking about you need to read Dr. Tiina P's latest email. Enjoy!

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"Ummmm, okay. When I was doing my alcoholism research, I had to interview guys who were homeless and who had been alcoholics for an average of 35 years. One of the questions was about the alcohols they drank when they couldn't get their hands on the good stuff, and by good stuff I mean
anything potable.

The overwhelming favorite was Listerine, with an alcohol content of 26% at $5 for a half galon. The advantages were that it was cheap, doesn't give a hangover, and as one guy said, "you can get it in jail." It had to be Listerine because "Scope makes you blow bubbles." Aqua Velva was called "blue lightning"- also a fave. One guy used to take a can of Lysol, open the can up with a can opener and let the air out *very slowly* then pour out the contents (about 60% alcohol) and dilute it in warm water. What did that taste like? You wonder. I asked- he said "like Thrills gum." Then, there was "record pressing," when you melt down old LP's and strain the effluent through a piece of cloth ("your shirt") and that gives a buzz, apparently.

When I went through their hospital charts, I had a look at their alcohol levels when they were brought to the emergency room. A regular drunk person- really really drunk would have a level of 18. Their levels were routinely 115, which speaks to the incredible tolerance they had, all fortified by Listerine.

OK Kung Foo Fighter- that's all I have for now- I hope you can use it. I gotta get back to work."

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Yes Tiina, you get back to work. And cheers!

How to Smash that Man Right Out of Your Hair

My friend Kim from SanFran recently was disappointed in love by her caddish ex-boyfriend who played the ole "I gotta move on, babe" card.

Well some people might get nothing but MAD...

But some people do what has to be done!

Kim does what has to be done.

Her email (below) suggests not only a fine therapeutic way of dealing with these things but also as a gentle reminder to caddish men everywhere that THEY WILL GET OVER YOU, ACE!

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Subj: Glass-Breakin

"So now that i actually did it i'd just like to report that i just went and broke some bottles and plates in an empty lot in emeryville (next to a huge apartment high rise!) with some 28 yr-old girl i found through craigslist (who was also dumped a couple months ago).

i posted an ad, in my more rage-filled days of two or so weeks ago (although i am still filled with plenty of stress), saying i wanted to go break some stuff, basically for rage-dispersion purposes. due to scheduling conflicts and me being unenthusiastic about email in general, we couldn't make our schedules work until just now.

i picked her up at the macarthur bart station-- she left me a phone message and said among other things that she'd be the white girl with a big bag of bottles and plates... i just barely made it there in time, i had also been waiting in the wrong area for a while. then i followed a friend's directions to what i was hoping would be a vast expanse of deserted parking lot near the freeway, but it didn't look very deserted. then we drove a little further and found something that looked deserted, but was actually, as mentioned above, next to a big apartment high rise. andrea's suggestion was just that we do it quickly and run away. so we were doing that for a bit, but then some guy from i think the apartment complex came over and shone a flashlight in our faces and said that people thought cars were being broken into. no, andrea said, i'm just breaking some plates for an art project! (she did tell me she was going to use the plate chips for a tabletop... i think she really is, but the bottles were definitely not for an "art project") he eventually went away, and she pointed out that:

" a) if he'd wanted us to stop he would have said so, and b) we probably weren't on his property anyway so he couldn't really do anything about it. so, it was fun. i could have done a lot more of it actually (if YOU ever want to do this, now you know who[m] to call!). i found the juice squeeze bottles a lot funner (sic) than the beer bottles (my roommate's boyfriend's i think)-- i think because the JS bottles were thinner or something."

and then i dropped her off near where she lives!

she seemed pretty cool and said if i ever wanted to do something really random again to give her a call or something, but she also said this was one of the weirdest things she'd ever done, so i think she might think i'm strange. i dunno."

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ACES KIM!

Cause Those Extra Ten Feet Are Always the Hardest...

You see the oddest things when you browse through Goodwill on a sunny Manhattan Saturday. Like this for example...

Not only did I have no idea that anyone actually fried turkeys but you coulda knocked me over with a feather (a turkey feather I suppose) when I noticed that THIS turkey fryer comes with a remote control ignition that works from up to ten whole feet away!

I imagine it goes something like this:

You wake up in your trailer with a hankering for a whole fried turkey... but you don't want it just yet... maybe you want to watch some football or, perhaps, french kiss your cousin. So you loads up the automatic turkey fryer, go about your business and when you feel that fried turkey hunger a-comin' on - you reach into your overalls and set the gal-blammed thing to cookin' - without having to stop watching the game OR dismounting your kin.

Now that's science for the people!

A Letter from Martha

As many of you know I have been reluctant to share many of the letters and postcards that Martha Stewart and I exchanged during her time away. But this most recent letter strikes me as so full of hope and pluck that I am sure Martha would understand why I want to share it with all of you.

All I can say by way of preamble is - God, what a woman!

"Dear Nick,

Well, since you ask, it feels GREAT to be out of “stir” (giggle) and back to my old life - or something close to it, anyhow. I can’t tell you how very much I appreciated the many (many!) letters and gifts you sent me during my time “away” and I want you to know that I have treasured and kept them all with the intention of making a beautiful collage to send you . I hope to get to that really soon, but first I have to sort out a couple those venal bitches at Omnimedia who tried to stage a little coup d’etat while Yours Truly was away at “Camp Cupcake”.

My first meeting after getting out went fairly well and you can bet that everyone was pretty damned AWARE that MARTHA WAS BACK by the time I finished giving them all a solid dose of what I like to call my “Talking Cure”. If tenuous job security, fear of physical harm and thinly-veiled blackmail are as effective as I think they are, well, you can rest assured I’ll have those share prices back up over $10.00 damned soon. I’ve always believed that nothing really motivates like fear – and I can tell you things over at MS Living ARE REAL MOTIVATED right about now.

I know you’d been curious about my day-to-day life while I was “up river” at Camp Cupcake – but I’m afraid there really isn’t a whole lot to tell – it’s all mind-numbing routine: Get up, lift weights, shower and shave, breakfast, watch TV, lift weights, lunch, teach remedial class in the afternoon (my favorite was a crocheting class I put together with a wall-eyed crack-whore named Francesca – we made shawls), dinner, watch more TV and then to bed.

So as you see life at the VERY WRONGLY NAMED Camp Cupcake isn’t much to write home (or you, dear dear Nick) about.

Of course there were the occasional diversions… a chance to work in the kitchen (HEAVEN!), a pick up basketball game, writing ENDLESS appeals to the Governor and, inevitably I suppose, the occasional fight.

As you know I’ve always been a ‘pen is mightier than the sword’ kinda gal – but I quickly learned that sometimes the Pen, in fact, has to BE the Sword (easily done with just a little bit of whittling, some tape for reinforcement of ‘the shank’ and a little work with a glue gun to reinforce the grip!). I’m not proud of what I had to do to survive – but dammit I AM A s-u-r-v-i-v-o-r and I’ll be goddamed if I’m going to let some little SPIC BITCH scarf down my Jello without some payback – Martha-style!

But all this makes it sound like there weren’t some truly lovely people to be met as well. So shame on me for dwelling on the negative!!!!

My cellmate, Erica, was a bull dyke of epic proportions but lovely as the day is long and, in the end, very servile and helpful in a way that pleased me greatly. Once she gets out I may offer her a job at O-media – she has a tenacious quality that I truly admire and, frankly, I have to say that I kind of miss having her around… her little routines, her crazy hiccupping laugh… her bawdy jokes in the dark after lights out…

But I digress! How are you?!?!?!

Oh WHO AM I KIDDING - I couldn't care less! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

But really...

I hope all is well and that - just because I may no longer be a shamed and “beaten down” Martha – you’re not going to keep on keeping in touch! It may take me a little while to get back on my feet, of course, but once I am I’d love to have you up to the house in CT for a lovely Spring Vegetable meal. Maybe by then Erica will be out and we can really make a night of it!

Well, I hate to dash but I have to go see my Parole Officer now, and then I’m heading into the office to crack a few skulls and menace some of the peons into line - it’s just like old times!

Do keep in touch and I will always remain,

Your O.G. Bee-yatch,

Martha"

DUCK!

Well - the article is pretty self-explanatory. Apparently ducks are sex-crazed rapists with a penchant for necrophilia. I'll avoid the obvious "dead duck" references and let you enjoy on your own...

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1432991,00.html

Quack

Dr. Tiina P checks in

Okay, so a new medical oddity has found it's way here from my good friend Doctor Tiina P. She writes:

"A 17-year-old boy jumped over a fence and sustained an avulsion injury to the fifth finger of his right hand when the ring he was wearing caught on the fence. The finger was amputated through the distal interphalangeal joint, and the tendon of the flexor digitorum profundus muscle was completely pulled out (Panel A). The insertion of the superficial flexor tendon remained intact, and the patient was able to flex the remaining stump of the finger. The torn-out tendon was resected, and the amputated part of the finger replanted microsurgically. Postoperative anticoagulant therapy consisted of aspirin and intravenous heparin given for seven days. Healing was uneventful, and the patient was discharged after 15 days. The final result is shown in Panel B. At seven weeks' follow-up, the patient was able to flex the finger actively; the range of motion was 50 degrees in the proximal interphalangeal joint and 30 degrees in the distal interphalangeal joint.
TTFN
T"

Now what that means in layman's terms is that this kid ripped off not only his finger but also neatly pulled out the entire tendon affixed to that finger up to around his 17 year old elbow. The following picture shows that quite clearly but, please, as with all of Tiina P's medical reports, don't click on the picture if you are squeamish. I've made the picture extra small for those who don't want the full panoply of visuals...

JESUS ANDJEHOSEPHAT! No No No No No!!

Thanks Tiina P for weirding us all out again!

Laugh it Up

What better to do on a Saturday night than maybe wax a little philosophical? Well - admittedly being out doing something raucous might be good too, but given I have a corker of a flu and neat shot of Bushmills to tame it with, a brief philosophical meander seems like just the thing.

I just got in from seeing Hotel Rwanda with my friend Mitch and, besides its truly moving portrait of one man's courage in the face of peril, impossible odds and the Western world's general indifference, it also got me to thinking about something else - the relationship between hatred and humor.

While that might seem trite on the surface, bear with me for a few and maybe we can all sort this one out together.

One thing that both the film and any number of books (not the least of which is Philip Gourevitch's terribly beautiful "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families") point out is that the ethnologic and cultural differences between a Tutsi and a Hutu is (or maybe more accurately WAS) so small as to be irrelevant. Then enter those sexy, beer-brewing, colonialism-loving Belgians and suddenly you had a country whose social and political lines were defined by 'ethnic' distinctions.

These ethnic distinctions had risen in the 19th century when ethnographers, with a zeal for measuring things like the width of a nose or the ratio of cheek to jowl, had sought to prove that Tutsis were members of a lost Christian tribe. Naturally a colonial government would glom on to this as an organizing principle and, well, the results of it all were, all at once writ large in consequence and shamefully small in news coverage and international action when it all came to a head in 1994.

800,000 Tutsis were killed and yet, somehow, the world kept turning on its axis.

A similar thing had happened not too many years before in Yugoslavia when Serbs and Croats had bent their ploughshares into swords and, with varying degrees of success, decided to do away with one another. Here, again, two groups who had shared the same land and were (essentially) homogeneous - though I'm sure that any nationalist-minded Serb or Croat reading this will be happy to kick my ass for saying so.

And that's where I begin my slow turn towards where comedy and hatred meet - and I don't mean amateur night at Caroline's! (ha!)

It all comes down to how we define ourselves.

As an amateur who has spent the last ten years studying humor and what it means I've come across a few things that suggest that the very same things that make us able to laugh at one another (perhaps force us to) are the very same things that make us able to kill one another in such droves.

Freud talked about "The narcissism of minor difference" - the notion that the smaller the difference is between two people (or peoples) the larger that difference would loom in their imagination; in short "what makes me ME is the thing that makes me not YOU". The width of my nose, my accent, my favorite band, my urbane sensibility versus your hayseed love of country music.

While distinctions like these are seemingly minor they are the thin edge of the wedge for both brutal ethnic conflicts and what is generally known as humor of 'the other' - and we all traffic in it. They are distinctions that give rise, equally, to a (harmless?) Polish or Farmer joke and a Serb's certainty that to be more Serbian I must define what about me is NOT Croatian or a Hutu's ability to methodically kill Tutsis from dusk until dawn.

The thing that both manifestations - the humorous and the hateful - have in common is that in defining the 'other' they also reinforce the sense of belonging in one's own group. The problem is that the former is generally dispensed with over a drink and the latter leads to war, murder, rape and ethnic cleansing.

I guess some people just don't know when they've taken a joke too far.

So THAT's how it works!

Ottawa, Ontario Canada. Manor Park Public School - Health class - 1977.

As Mr. Conboy unveiled a diagram of the female reproductive system Katrina Velavadova took one look and threw up on her desk.

Some tittered, some took notes, all moved a little further away from Katrina's desk.

I, of course, was light years ahead of the curve having been amply supplied with books by my parents to "demystify" the strange, gurgling changes that were sweeping through me like fire through a wheatfield.

These books, as I recall, were called "Where Did I Come From" - in which reproduction was explained through the loving exploits of a pair of very chubby and very naked cartoon characters - from this book I learned that an orgasm is a lot "like being tickled... but you can't be tickled forever", and that when adults have sex little cartoon hearts drift up from the locus of their fevered loins.

"What's Happening to Me" - in which a pimply teenage protagonist informed me that masturbation was "OK".

Ha! OK? Show's what he knew - when one is thirteen - masturbation rates a little higher than just "OK".

But the jewel in the crown was "Show Me"...

"Show Me" was, at its essence, a progressive exercise in soft core porn and, to my pre-pubescent mind it was about "The bestest present ever!!". How I thrilled to the naked, black-and-white exploits of these naked (German?) hippies and their naked german hippie children in their naked german hippie commune. The book, which I think was put together by a pyschologist and an art photographer, documented - in painfully frozen moments - the random fumblings of a polyamorous german community. Accompanying text gently reminded the reader (me) that everything going in the pictures on was 'perfectly natural'.

From my perspective at the time it all seemed about as natural as the notion of a three-headed dog. The end result was that I had something like this floating around in my head for years...

Katrina Velavadova ended up "knocked up" in high school and dropped out.

I was busted for shoplifting costume jewelry that I was going to GIVE to Katrina Velavadova.

What's the moral? I have no idea. Sex is mysterious...

Stop whistling at my balls!

In the summer of 1984 a Canadian man lay injured in the midst of an arena riot in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

What does a man think at such a time... where does his mind go? Well for Ron Foxcroft it went here...

"IF I LIVE THROUGH THIS RIOT I AM GOING BACK TO CANADA AND I AM GOING TO DESIGN A PEA-LESS WHISTLE!"

As a professional basketball referee Ron Foxcroft had often been frustrated by whistles. The cork "pea", which made the noise, would jam and no sound would come out.

While working a pre-Olympic basketball game in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1984, Foxcroft blew his whistle when a Brazilian player was fouled at centre court.

The whistle jammed, play continued, and a riot erupted. And thus was born one man's dream - to create a "pea-less" whistle.

Despite the fact that no bank would support him, Foxcroft made good on his promise by 1987 (proving that he wasn't just whistling Dixie... sorry...).

The Fox 40 whistle features harmonically tuned air chambers and can be heard over a mile away. It is now used by the NHL, NBA, NFL, CFL, NCAA, FIFA, and FINA, as well as the US Coast Guard, Royal Life Saving Society of Canada, American Red Cross, NATO forces, and many more organizations.

In short, that's one hell of a pea-less whistle.

Oy, Mein head

I spent yesterday afternoon at the 10th street Shvitz sweating out the remains of an improptu dinner and drinks (heavy on the drinks) night with our friend Amber and her newly-arrived-from-LA-rock-star boyfriend Rick.

What my memory can salvage of Saturday night involved some nostalgic slam dancing in our living room, a broken wine glass and some gridiron-worthy flying tackles to illustrate...

...what? I'm not sure exactly.

Whatever the case may be Sunday found me primed and ready for a few hours at the Shvitz.

What is the Shvitz you ask? Well slip me a tylenol and stop talking so loud and I'll tell you. The Shvitz (or Bania, or 10th street Bathhouse, or 'The Russian Turkish Baths" is an ancient east village institution dedicated to heat, sweat and low-rent spa amenities. Towels, sandals, robes and shorts are provided on your way in (women bring a bikini top or bathing suit).

Each room at the Shvitz is hotter than the next - with the exception of the cold pool which, as cold-pools go is very cold indeed and guaranteed to make your nether regions (if you are male) ask themselves if they should put up with this abuse or head north for the rest of the winter.

The rooms themselves break down along the following lines:
- Steam room: Houston in July
- Sauna: Albuquerque in August
- Dry Steam Room: The Sahara after a light rain.
- The "Russian" room: The very center of hell itself.

While all this may sound unpleasant it actually isn't. Men and women mill around like the lunatics from "Midnight Express" - many mumbling to themselves or groaning with steam pleasure or, conversely, carrying on loud political arguments in that inimitable Bronx/Brooklyn accent that makes everyone sound like the expert they want to be.

Added to this chorus are the Orthodox Jews who still speak in Yiddish and, at times, end up 'Davening' together (sort of like a mumbly Yiddish prayer - at least to my ears and forgive my ignorance if something else is going on) in the Russian room. Mingled with all this is the constant sound of running water as it flows into buckets (to be poured on the head before you spontaneously burst into flames) and the echoing quality of the rooms themselves - stone walled and reminiscent of The Carceri. Visually the experience is like being plopped into a Chiaroscuro painting by Caravaggio - mysterious and shadowy...

Oh yeah - and hot!

Real masochists might want to opt for a Platza - which involves an enormous russian dude whomping the crap out of you with a bundle of oak leaves in the hottest room available. I tried it once and nearly passed out - so be warned. If you want one look for a guy wearing an elf-like hat...

You can always take a break from the heat by going upstairs and having a fresh juice, shot of vodka or borscht. Yesterday I opted for a 'liver cleanser' juice and some rye bread with smoked salmon. Perfect!

The 10th street Shvitz used to have a pretty seedy reputation. When I first started going in the mid 90's it was very hard to get a 'legit' massage and, more often than not, you would find yourself being offered a "special" (Pronounced "spee-ye-shul") by one of the enormous russian women who worked as masseuses. But ever since the place was busted by the vice squad they've cleaned up their act and you can get as good (and as cheap) a massage as those uptown toffee-noses who go to places like Bliss and drop 200 bucks. At the Shvitz it's $60.00 for an hour and they have everything from shiatsu to bone-crushing russian massages that will make your spine pop and leave you unable to feel your legs for a few hours.

And, in the end, it was mission successful! So successful that I was actually capable of happily focusing on the new shoes that Patricia bought on her Sunday shopping spree.

From belligerent troll-with-a-hangover to doting boyfriend in merely three hours! Not bad. Well done Shvitz!