[email fragment] This morning I finished reading "Swann's Way". I'm not sure how many volumes of Proust you have to've read before you can say things like "well, I've been reading Proust and ..." I'm also halfway through Lauren Bacall's autobiography, which evidently won the National Book Award back in the late 70s. I still can't tell whether that was because it's a good book in its own right, or just a good book considering it was written by a movie star. Still, interesting Bogart tidbits.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "The sea cucumber may seem an unlikely icon to attract tourists, but it has been chosen by the Guam Visitors Bureau to promote the rich marine life of Tumon Bay. The bay is central to Guam tourism, as it is where most hotels are located, but encounters with sea cucumbers, or 'balate', have been keeping tourists away from the water. To change this, the Visitors Bureau has decided to turn the creature into a cartoon character and its latest educational tool."

"The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip-Hop 1979-1983"

I came up with an interesting a philsophy-of-surgery question the other night while watching the latest horribly, horribly written earthquake-disaster miniseries on NBC. Anyhow, there was a surgery scene and I was struck (though it wasn't really anything new) at just how fully masked everyone in the OR is. I understand why that is, of course, in terms of keeping things sterile and all that, but I wonder what the psychological and sociological effect the masking ritual has on the whole process of surgery. I was reminded of an article I read last year in The Economist, on the child-soldiers of LURD, the Liberian revolutionary group, and their penchant for cross-dressing, putting on makeup or wigs of shower caps before committing their various atrocities -- the point being that it was likely a modernization of traditional W.African usages of mask and costume, the idea being that once you don the mask (even one that doesn't conceal your identity), you become in some sense a different person, and so can't be held responsible for your actions. I suppose the Western traditions of Carnival, Halloween, or, in a different mode, bank robbery, are a long similar lines, though with a bit less emphasis on full possession.

Anyway, given the (often necessarily) ritual nature of surgery, it seems at least metaphorically significant that masks are involved -- perhaps as a way of distancing the surgeons from the patient, or indeed from each other, and I guess of disguising the emotions and keeping things as scientific/mechanistic as possible.

Perhaps just a bunch of psychobabble, but my question's this: if someone invented a perfectly transparent surgical mask, hat, etc. -- that would provide all the antiseptic effects as the current system, and allow for full view of facial expressions in the OR, would surgeons go for it? And how might it change the operating room dynamics, both between members of the surgical team, and, at least in one direction, between surgeon and surgee?

[email fragment] First off, Norfolk Island is not, technically, between Australia and New Zealand, in the sense that one couldn't travel in a straight line and intersect all three. It's a little too far north. But we can accurately say it's between New Zealand and New Caledonia, or between Australia and Fiji.

Secondly [in relation to a discussion of the distinctly un-pine-like Norfolk Island Pine], you really should listen to the Australian-born, Norfolk-Island-Recordin' country singer I emailed you about, Kasey Chambers. If only for her song "These Pines", which takes on oodles of new meaning when you consider where it was recorded:

These pines are not the ones that I'm used to
They won't carry me home when I cry
Am I too far gone to recover
Or can I turn if I try
Should I trade my soul for another
Should I stay and pretend that I'm happy
Like so many times before

Yeah these pines
Are not mine
They don't smell so sweet
like the ones in my mind
And I search the needles
'Til I run out of time
But I don't see you in These Pines.

These past few months I've been doing a lot of searches at iTunes.com for the frequency of specific words in song titles, mostly to see which words of a particular set had the most songs with them in the title. i.e.:

Morning 1481
Afternoon 173
Evening 301
Night 4250

Monday 226
Tuesday 83
Wednesday 31
Thursday 29
Friday 186
Saturday 293
Sunday 549

I also learned that, while iTunes has 564 songs with "mile" in the title, and 68 with "inch", only 9 contain "meter" -- and of those, none of the usages is in the sense of distance.

After that I dredged up an older question, at last near-answerable, about whether (and why) certain names were much more common in song titles than in real life. i.e.:

iTunes Counts for Top 10 Female Names in USA (1990 Census)

1. Mary 685
2. Patricia/Patty 33
3. Linda 134
4. Barbara 66
5. Elizabeth/Beth 111
6. Jennifer/Jenny 161
7. Maria 587
8. Susan/Susie/Sue 577
9. Margaret/Maggie/Meg 200
10. Dorothy 14