Headaches and Other Brain Drains

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My brain decided to spontaneously explode on Sunday night.

As it’s a brain, and not a keg of dynamite with a fuse and a match, it didn’t do a very good job of it, and as the blizzard sailed in like the Flying Dutchman, my headache got worse and worse.

Though it’s far from lethal, there’s nothing quite like an ordinary, garden-variety sinus headache. I don’t know how you folks who get migraines deal with it, I really don’t. The infinitely-less-powerful sinus headaches I occasionally get are quite enough.

This time, prompted by atmospheric pressure changes that brought snow to apparently every single person on social media ever, my headache was impervious to my old reliable weapons, Aleve and Claritin. Advil did nothing. And the nausea was bad enough that I didn’t dare lie down and risk putting pressure on any internal organs.

But, as most headaches do, it eventually vanished, leaving me bored, because I couldn’t concentrate on anything more complicated than “OGG SMASH WITH ROCK,” and tired, because I hadn’t been able to sleep what with the throbbin’ noggin (which may be a good name for a band) and all.

Still, it was just a headache, and not even a migraine at that. No big deal.

Real Klingons Wear Pink in Star Trek: The Animated Series

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Star Trek: The Animated Series

Star Trek: The Animated Series

Giant pink tribbles. Spock casting magic spells. The crew turning into babies, growing gills, or shrinking. Is there no weirdness that failed to occur on Star Trek: The Animated Series?

No. No, there isn’t. And that’s why the show, which ran from 1973-74, is pure, unadulterated awesome.

Though it occupies a dubious position in Trekkie canon, The Animated Series is a must-see for fans, who will be treated to a succession of wacky events involving the almost the entire cast of The Original Series.

Inexplicably, Chekov is gone. Equally inexplicably, every single alien being sounds suspiciPink Tribbles?ously like Scotty, Nurse Chapel or Uhura. Actually, the explanation was saving money by not hiring extra voice actors or Chekov’s actor, Walter Koenig.

But this enabled them to do something the Original Series could never do, by crewing the Enterprise with more aliens. Foremost among them are the six-limbed Arex, who occupies Chekov’s seat most of the time, and M’Ress, a cat-woman communications officer.

At the time of the Original Series, I don’t think it would have been possible to have shown a guy with an extra arm and leg, like Arex had, and M’Ress would have had a somewhat wooden expression if she’d been a real person with a face covered with fur.

And then there’s the fact that one of the people working on the show was colorblind.

As a result, Klingons wear pink and purple, and Klingons in Orchid?the Kzinti, who are supposed to be terrifying telepathic cat-wolverine-people, do too.

Plus there are pink tribbles. Giant pink tribbles. If there were a way to market these to 12-year-old girls Earth would be drowned in tribbles in a matter of hours. Talk about weapons of mass destruction!

Then there’s the elevator-music theme song, which definitely is worse than the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise, no matter what anybody says, although the animated Enterprise is so darn cute it’s easy to forgive the tune.

If you have Netflix and loved Original Series Star Trek, or just want to kill a few hours watching pure, undiluted insanity in the form of the loopiest plots ever seen in any flavor of Star Trek, check out Star Trek: The Animated Series.

For more information, check out Memory Alpha, the go-to place for online information on Star Trek, and also the source of every picture above.

Advice Columnist Practice Letter

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I’ve often thought it would be fun to become an advice columnist, though I have to admit that it would also be a responsibility. What if someone took my advice and something terrible happened?

Then again, maybe my readers can give great advice, too!

So I thought I’d do a practice test. I’ve written a letter based on comments I’ve seen on some health websites, in which people advocating for quack remedies try to convince scientists and doctors that they are all wrong. Some of these folks believe having an enema will solve most health problems.

Dear Helpful Adviser,

I need help convincing people online that they should agree with me. I have tried absolutely everything I can think of to get them to listen to my position, including calling them morons, explaining why they are stupid in great detail. I have employed animal imagery, comparing them to snakes, weasels and pigs at a trough.

I have used tenuous connections to show they are part of a vast global conspiracy of very evil people who want to suppress The Truth. I’ve even told them that clearly they hate their children, other people’s children, old people and puppies, and noted that they are drinking the koolaid, even though the culprit at Jonestown was actually cyanide (and other stuff) in Flavor Aid, not koolaid. I have told them they are sinners and murderers.

I have even compared them to Hitler and the Nazis, multiple times, yet they still don’t agree with me. I can’t understand it! Why can’t I convince people I’m right?

Sincerely,
Confused

And here would be my practice answer to these folks, who again, believe enemas and happy thoughts can cure everything. What do you think, should I try an advice column?

Dear Confused,

I can’t imagine why not.

Sincerely,
Adviser

The Weirdness That Is Gangnam Style

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If you haven’t heard of Gangnam Style by now, it’s a silly Korean pop song that went spectacularly viral online and has since become tremendously popular.

Its music video on YouTube has more than a billion views. Yes, that’s “billion” with a B.

It’s also spawned a number of versions and parodies, some of which are worth watching and others of which definitely are not.

  • Glee did a show choir version. There are also a couple of marching band versions, but I wasn’t able to find one I liked enough to link. Sorry.
  • Here’s an Inuit version. This is absolutely great, and incorporates a bit of actual Inuit culture into a silly fun pop song.
  • Someone set their Christmas lights to it.
  • And finally, there’s a mashup with M.C. Hammer. It works better than I would have expected, which is to say it works to any extent at all.

Any versions you like out there?

Edit:

  • Farmer Style is an awesome one! Well-filmed, tuneful and awesome! (via commenter thrivingmom. Thanks!)

Lost Letters, Awful Trends, and People Who Have Lost Their Heads

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As it’s the beginning of the year, bloggers and reporters are doing a lot of year-in-review stuff. I’m not, but here are a few things that have caught my eye recently.

  • The alphabet is pretty codified these days, and there’s no use trying to get them to squeeze an extra letter in there, or even a smiley-face. Here are some of the sad letters that did not make the cut. Alas, poor thorn, we hardly knew thee.
  • Here’s a list of trends that need to die in 2013. They are fashion trends, and while I don’t agree with all of them, I hope never to see another see-through lace dress prominently displaying a star’s underwear beneath. I don’t need to see your undies, ladies. They are not that interesting, and in fact, wearing that outfit makes you look like you accidentally put on a slip instead of real clothes this morning.
  • This gallery of photos of a defunct amusement park did not come from Pripyat, the city evacuated when Chernobyl’s reactor blew. However, it did come from a Soviet-style amusement park in East Berlin, and it’s quite haunting in its own right. (via BoingBoing)
  • Stellar health writer Anne Polta of the West Central Tribune chronicles the health-related things she’d like to see kicked to the curb along with the year 2012. All I can say is hear, hear.
  • This gallery of headless people is totally photoshopped. Actually, these headless photos were done long before Photoshop existed, but people still found a way to create comical and plain old bizarre photos of people holding their own heads, or loved ones’ heads. In other words, yes, Victorians did have a sense of humor. (via BoingBoing)

 

Some Cheer for a Difficult Day

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Tragedies and difficult times are occurring today.

There’s not a way for me to help in any meaningful way, but looking back at my grandfather’s funeral, I mostly recall that a cousin’s inadvertent joke made us all laugh–and knowing that my grandfather would have laughed harder than anyone. That made us all feel better, and it was a fitting memorial for a guy with a loopy sense of humor.

In that spirit, I offer you a few links that may at least give you a bit of a smile.

  • Gangnam Style is funny, but this educational parody from NASA is even better. It’s so nice to see women doing science and not just being used as eye candy.
  • Here’s a list from Poynter of the best media errors and corrections of the year. Some of them are flinchworthy, but others are just hilarious. I have to offer kudos to the kids who sent a correction notice in regarding the day the Titanic struck an iceberg.
  • And from the Atlantic Wire, another list of the Best (Worst?) Typos, Mistakes, and Correrctions of 2012. Because one good Correrction list deserves another, am I right? This one has more childish errors, such as an incidence of the infamous leaving-the-L-out-of-public. These are the typos that keep the press awake at night praying we remembered the Ls and didn’t switch the w in “wrap” for a c.

 

Seven Benefits of Roleplaying Games

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A student at the University of Minnesota Duluth has written a column for the Duluth News Tribune implying that video games, or perhaps roleplaying games, or perhaps first-person shooters, or perhaps tabletop games, or people who dress up in costumes to portray characters, are bad.

I’m honestly not sure which of these elements Jo Cooley objects to, because she (or he) seems to conflate them all together.

Overall, I believe the point of her column is that Duluth does not need a gaming convention. She cites one study purporting to link video games and violence, but seems to believe that video games are the focus of Indiana’s Gen Con. They are not. Gen Con focuses on other types of games–tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering and maybe even Risk and Settlers of Cataan.

Gaming (and I don’t mean gambling) is a huge umbrella term that covers a wide, wide variety of hobbies, from the strategy-wargaming to the roleplaying dice games to LARPing to the many types of videogaming.

Each gaming community is different. It’s just like football fans, who have their own communities dedicated to glorifying the Packers or the Vikings. Just like baseball fans, people get involved at different levels, some just watching a game now and then and others memorizing reams of stats and participating in a fantasy league (which is a form of roleplaying, by the way).

Videogames cover a wide range of topics and the larger, ongoing games have their own individualized communities. Star Wars: Knights of the Republic attracts a different type of gamer than EVE Online does.

Painting every gamer with the same brush is just like making a comment about “the media.” Almost nothing can be said about “the media,” which includes the head honchos of Disney and the small-town reporter who covers high school football games, as well as people who make TV shows, movies and books. The term is so wide it’s useless.

The same is true of “gamers.” I’m a gamer. I do not often play first-person shooters. I do not like strategy games or games with extreme gore. I don’t even usually play more than one video game at a time–I dedicate myself to just one, until I leave that behind for another one.

Currently I’m playing Guild Wars 2, and by the way, the plotline involves saving the world from evil, not being evil. In fact, most videogames I’ve played have been like that. There are a few out there in which you’re the bad guy, and a few more in which you’re allowed to make moral choices yourself, yes, but generally people seem to prefer being the good guy.

This brings me to the benefits of roleplaying–pretending to be a character in a story, either in a video game or in a tabletop game–and yes, I do believe there are some.

  • Roleplayers learn about how story works in an interactive way. I’ve learned arguably more about storytelling from participating in Dungeons & Dragons and games like it than I ever learned in school. You learn the nuts and bolts of character and plot, but you also learn about pacing and theme. All of it’s hands-on, where you’re helping make it, so you get a much better grasp than you would by simply reading the definition of “plot.”
  • Roleplaying gives you a safe place to explore moral decision-making without hurting anyone. Characters I play tend to be theologically-inclined and concerned about ethics, but like people in the real world sometimes they have to make difficult choices. Do you allow a princess to be sacrificed to save her kingdom? Do you allow her to sacrifice herself to do it? Do you save her regardless of consequences, or do you offer to change places with her? In a good game you will be faced with difficult situations and difficult choices over and over again, and it will prepare you to think about ethical choices in the real world, where there will be real consequences.
  • Roleplaying gives you a chance to be in somebody else’s shoes for a little while. If done well, this should lead you to think about what other people’s lives are truly like, and should lead you to empathize with other people’s problems. You can try roleplaying as the opposite gender, or as someone from a totally different race or economic class from your own. What are the consequences of living in a different type of society? What would it mean to live in a society of machines, or people who do not die for hundreds of years?
  • Roleplaying often spurs learning. I once roleplayed as a pirate character, and while our pirates were much nicer people than the real thing (real pirates were generally horrible), I did a lot of research on the Age of Sail and pre-anaesthesia medical practices. Roleplaying has also led to research on early stringed instruments and folk music, the law, folklore, floriography and religion. I have learned all sorts of things from roleplaying.
  • Roleplaying forces you to work together as a group. In most cases, your character will not last long if he or she goes around stabbing random passersby. He or she certainly won’t do well if he or she stabs other party members. It’s like being a member of a rock band–you have to get along with these people, and that’s both in-character and out-of-character. It’s a social hobby, and you can’t do it alone, so you better leave at least part of your ego at the door.
  • Roleplaying can be about forming good values. I’ve been involved in a lot of games over the years, and the most prominent themes have been good conquering evil, family, love, justice and what it means to be human.
  • Roleplaying spurs your imagination. In a movie, you know what the protagonist looks like and sounds like and acts like and wears. When you’re playing a tabletop game, you’re not going to know any of that and you’re just going to have to imagine that red dragon bearing down on you, too. Even if you’re roleplaying through a videogame, most games don’t allow a lot of nuance in body shape or voices, so you’re still going to need to adjust the picture in your head according to what’s said.

The Shootings

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I don’t really have a lot to say about the Friday shootings in Newtown, Conn., other than to say how very sorry I am. Of course this is unhelpful.

I do have a few scattered thoughts on the subject, however.

1. People started looking at gun control issues almost immediately. This may or may not be helpful; I don’t know and take no position on it. However, I do wonder why so little talk about mental health issues is occurring.

2. People need to be wary about oversimplifying this problem. It is large and complex, and solutions are not likely to be simple, easy or cheap.

3. People forget the past very quickly. Whatever efforts toward solutions and preventions are made, they should recall that school violence is not a new thing. The horrors of Newtown are fresh in our minds; the memories of Columbine have not yet faded. But please, in the rush to find reasons and solutions, do not forget earlier victims. Remember that school violence takes many forms.

Remember Newtown, remember Columbine, remember Virginia Tech, yes, but also remember Bath, and the 45 people who were killed there.

They were killed by bombs, placed in their school with fiendish deliberation over a period of months by a member of the school board–not recently, but in 1927.

First, the killer detonated bombs at his own farm, so that rescuers would be far away. Then, he blew up most of the school–though as it turns out, one wing was spared because the bombs in it failed to go off. Finally, he filled his truck full of shrapnel and drove to the school to blow it up, slaying some of the adults desperately trying to rescue children from the wreckage of the building.

School violence takes many forms, has many causes, and perpetrators include the young and old. Most are men, but yes, there are women as well. Some have been students or school officials (like the Bath bomber), but others were not. Some have used bombs, some have used guns; some have used both or neither.

It is always horrifying.

10 Rules for Naming a Baby

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Selecting a name for your baby isn’t easy, with so many names to choose from.

At the risk of putting my foot in it, because I’m not a parent and have never had to make this kind of life-altering decision for someone else, I would like to help.

Because while I like my own first name, Kari, quite a bit, I have to admit it’s caused me no small amount of aggravation throughout my life, because people both spell and mispronounce it incorrectly, sometimes literally seconds after I’ve introduced myself. It’s not their fault, though. I just have a weird name.

So here’s a few things to think about while you’re choosing your own baby’s name.

1. Avoid “creative” spellings and “creative” pronunciations.

If a name has an i in it, you do not need to replace it with a y so that your child will be unique (unyque?). It’s not necessary. Your child will already be unique. And given the popularity of the letter y, there’s a good chance that there will already be an Ylyce or a Kylyyy in her class anyway.

Having a name that you have to spell out over the phone every time you say it, and having a name which is constantly mispronounced isn’t unique. It’s annoying.

Think about it. Every teacher you ever have will say it wrong the first time. Every client you introduce yourself to will say your name incorrectly even if you’ve just said it. Every letter you get will be addressed to someone who isn’t you. When you go to a conference for work, your pre-printed name tag will probably be wrong. And you will never, never find anything engraved with your name–not one single mug, keychain or snowglobe. Ever.

2. Avoid “trendy” names.

How many Isabellas and Jacobs will there be in your child’s class? How many Anastasias and Christians?

Incidentally, do you want to explain to your child that he or she was named after a sparkly vampire or a racy romance novel? Do you want your eight-year-old reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” to find out about her namesake? No? Then don’t do that.

And I say this with a heavy heart, because I like all those names myself.

3. Always google the name and watch out for unpleasant associations.

I think the name “Jersey” is cute. Unfortunately, it is also the name of a breed of cow. Eventually, some kid in your kid’s class will google your child’s name. It may even be your child. You can’t really prevent every possible association (Mercedes used to be a perfectly pretty name for a girl), but at least give it a shot.

Someday the boy you chose not to name Enron will thank you.

4. Consider family names.

Even if they’re terrible, your child will know that someone else had it first, and that there is a reason for it. Also, there is someone to blame apart from the parents, which can be nice.

I’m named after two great-grandmothers. I actually like that; it gives me an excuse and when I’m ceaselessly spelling out my name to people over the phone, or repeating how to pronounce it correctly, I usually say “It’s Norwegian.” Generally people accept that as a valid excuse, and in the Midwest it can be a handy conversation-opener, too.

5. Consider names that allow for nicknames.

I’ve always envied Elizabeths. At the drop of a hat, they can magically change from a Liz to Lizzie, Eliza, Liza, Beth, Lisbeth, Lisbet, Bette, Betty and probably more. The name is the functional equivalent of a transformer, and you have all degrees of familiarity and style at your fingertips.

As a Kari I’m pretty much limited to my actual name. That’s okay with me, but you can never go wrong with more options.

Caveat: To parents who want to name your child something that will absolutely make any nicknames completely impossible: Dwight Eisenhower’s mom felt this way too, and that is how she ended up with a son named Ike. If the kid wants a nickname enough, he or she will probably get one, whether you like it or not.

6. Your child is a child, not an animal. Avoid being cutesy.

The names Hekyll and Jekyll work great for a pair of cartoon magpies. A set of human twins deserves better than that, and as they age, they will not always want to be seen as a single entity. It’s best not to name them as if they were, and give them a bit of space in which to work out their own individual identities.

If you really want to have some sort of theme, do it in a way that isn’t going to be obvious to everyone your child will meet. For example, in my family we have a set of five children whose names begin with vowels: A, E, I, O, U. I think that’s clever. If you met any two of those children, you wouldn’t know the pattern, and plus, each name stands quite well on its own. I don’t really know how they feel about it, but if you want a theme, I’d say that’s the way to do it.

7. Consider the initials.

I don’t mind KEL, but I might have felt differently about LOL or worse, FML.

… now that I think of it, it’s probably best to google the initials too.

(If you do, note that the abbreviation FML stands for something you probably would not say in front of your sweet old granny.)

8. Names should be versatile.

Your child may end up being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or your child may end up being a firefighter, a house painter or a ballerina. Whatever name you choose should fit equally well in each of those settings.

Will the name look professional on a business card? Will your child have difficulty establishing him or herself as a serious, reliable person? Are you naming your child something so cute he or she will sound like a bubblehead?

9. Consider cultural factors.

There are only so many syllables out there, so no matter what name you choose, it likely means something hilarious in some language, somewhere. Just ask Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose perfectly sensible Egyptian name sounds strange to an American.

The best you can do is try to make sure that somewhere is not where you plan to be living in the long term, so that your child can at least avoid some hysterical giggles.

10. Make your own decision.

At the end of the day, it’s your kid! You get to make the decision yourself.

If you want to name your child Jersey Ysybella Boutros-Boutros Cherry Pie Willetina III, you absolutely can! These aren’t rules, for Nevaeh’s sake.

And it’s probably best to take all naming advice with a very large grain of salt. Everybody’s got their own opinions on the subject.