I'd buy it

The text below has been gotten from an auction on ebay for a new iPod Touch. It suffices to say the seller's marketing skills pretty much leave me speechless.


This iPod is brand new! It's black, sleek, and thin. The resolution is tizight and perfect for watching those late night movies under the covers!
All movies look good on this mofo, except for Episode I, II, or III, heck they didn't even look good on a Christie - don't watch them.
Includes:
some cables and stuff - iPod touch earphones (hehe) ands a USB cable! (Woot!)
In addition to all thapt crazyness it also sports Wi-fi so you can creeps all them access points that people leave open. Watch out for honey pots!
Who needs spanish fly when you got an iPod Touch? It's the player for the Playaa.
If your girlfriend is hot send me a pic. Otherwise don't bother with questions and stuff, I ain't gots time to be answerin that shiznit!

Hawkers or Healers?

Check out this interesting, albeit dated, op/ed piece by Atul Gawande:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/04/04/050404fa_fact?currentPage=1

Dear Journal, I'm Sorry

I kept a journal in middle school. In fact, it was after I became obsessed with the cartoon "Doug" that I began the habit. I don't know if they had "Doug" while you were growing up, but in my day, it was quite popular. I would scribble in it nightly before I went to sleep, sometimes with fury if the day's events had not pleased me, other times with mundane brevity if what had passed had been an uneventful twenty-four hours. Nevertheless, I dumped every last secret, wish, and desire of my blooming pubescent mind into that thin sky blue notebook (wide rule) - my love for the girl with black shoulder length hair, soda-can size glasses, and a seductive mole beneath the dimple of her right cheek, my hatred for the more popular guys with better looks with whom she hung out, and my vow of vindication to all the gods in the sky that I would one day be triumphant - Now, over what I needed to triumph, I'm sure I had no idea, but nevertheless, a vow is a vow. Unless, that is, you burn the notebook on which that vow is physically written, which is what I did four years later during an fit of great embarrassment followed by anxious distress.

It was sometime during the summer of my junior year of high school. I had found the notebook hidden in a bottom drawer of my desk while I was cleaning my room. Naturally, I had forgotten all about the journal that I've failed to write in since eighth grade. But upon noticing the warning sign on the front cover that read "DO NOT READ!", (I didn't have one of those nice little locks, so a verbal deterrent was my only means of protection from predatory eyes.) I knew immediately what the sky blue covers contained. There are certain images in life whose sight you can never forget, and prominent amongst these are items or persons that can cause you to lose a great deal of face. I flipped slowly through the notebook, reading each entry with great scrutiny, attempting to decipher the verbal encryptions laid out by my middle school self. It's amazing how much a child can change in just four short years. By the time I had finished the entire notebook, I was so overtaken by shame and embarrassment that I could no longer bear the existence of my former self, much less the very solid proof that laid in my hands. For me, there could be only one solution. The notebook must be destroyed. Now, I can tell you, even in my young age, I was fully cognizant of the gravity of these actions. I was obliterating literal proof of my life. I was denying the existence of a part of myself. I would never again be able to suffer through that sense of great hilarity coupled with cringing shame. But alas, it was too much. I could not live with the oh-so-naïve thoughts of my past, much less their physical manifestations decipherable to anyone who came across this great bane of my life.

I walked out into the courtyard of the apartment complex with a box of matches and the notebook in my right hand. It must have been a hot summer day, for I remember the t-shirt sticking to my back; boring too, which must explain why I was cleaning. I squatted down on the gravel pavement, knees bent and pointed toward the sky like a frog on the verge of leaping. With the notebook lying prostrate before me, I stared at it for a few seconds, thinking it funny that the Japanese characters on the cover ("Nottoboku" it read in white katakana characters) seemed all too aware of its impending execution. I struck the match with my right hand, careful to protect it from any vagrant breezes, and set the tip of the flame to the lower right corner of my journal. I remember it catching fire more easily than I had anticipated, as if I had expected my life to put up more of a fight in the face of such reckless self-destruction. It did not.

The Teacher-Physician

I like to teach people things they'd like to know. For example, I'm always attempting to explain to the patients at my preceptorship the etiology of their illnesses. You wouldn't think that these people, largely without graduate degrees or scientific background would be even half-interested in listening to a first year medical student babble on endlessly about endolymph jets and inner hair cells, but the reality is, they eat that stuff up. I guess it's easy when everyone's favorite subject is themselves.

My preceptor doesn't teach much though. He just hears them out for a few minutes, prescribes the medicines he believes to be appropriate and asks them to come back in two week. He's not hurting for business so I guess they do come back.

Me on the other hand, I'm the complete opposite. I want to tell them everything I know about their illness, from the history of the illness (Did you know that Van Gogh had Meniere's Disease?) to the most minute scientific detail (Oh, that's just the increased endolymph pressure depolarizing the hair cells in your utricle, saccule, and cupula of your semicircular canals. What's a cupula, you ask? Well..." I want to selflessly share every last piece of trivial information I have gathered from the lips of my learned professors. "This is good" you might say "You're taking away their fear of the illness through education." Yet, when every last bit of relevant information has been exhausted from my mind, when the chasm of knowledge has been bridged between the patient and myself and naught is left but to discuss the possible avenues of treatment, I become suddenly, a mute.

I forgive myself though (I hear self-forgiveness is a must for survival in such a career). I mean after all, I can't be expected to know everything under the sun. My usual response is "Tell you what, I'll go get Dr. So-and-so in here, and together, the three of us can discuss your treatment options. Does that sound good? Great!"

*makes graceful exit, dignity intact*

Death and Noodles

It's hard to imagine that life and death is happening everywhere. I'm not talking about human beings, specifically, or even living organisms for that matter. I'm just pondering about the appearance and disappearance of all things.

I was watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show "No Reservations" where he goes to Hong Kong. (They're always somewhere in Asia) During a specific segment of the show, he visits a noodlemaker. Except this is no ordinary noodlemaker by today's standards. He is a craftsmen of the ancient world.

Noodlemakers today are operators of mechanized robots pounding away at a mixture of ingredients, eggs, water, flour. As a result, you can eat a bowl of noodles - my favorite being chicken and mushroom soup noodle with two boy choy stems lined brilliantly along the side like a giant green smile - and recognize the prior existence of each separate ingredient. But truly great handmade noodles - if you have ever been lucky enough to consume them - are an entirely different breed. Truly great handmade noodles make you believe that the noodles themselves could never have taken any other form than that which is present in the bowl before you. Pure and elemental, their composition is nothing more complex than that of a fruit or vegetable harvested seasonally from a noodle tree. Although morphologically, they might appear to retain similarities to their factory-born cousins, the true difference, as with us all, lies deep beneath the skin, burrowed into the very stuff of existence. These are not nameless noodles formed from brown shell/white shell chicken eggs, hard mineralized faucet water, or white flour pounded down to the lowest common denominator of wheat. These are noodles made by a man. A thin man of aging years, who wears faded green boxer shorts and a thin wash-worn wife-beater over his well-tanned torso.

He brandishes a thick bamboo shaft as his weapon of choice. Inserting the thick shaft into a divot in his wall that lies directly above the perpendicular surface of his kneading table, he prepares himself for the most strenuous - and some would argue, the most charmingly unique - part of the noodlemaking process. The bamboo shaft, fixed on one end into the wall, lies atop a heaping pile of noodle mixture. Now, the next part I am about to describe you will perhaps instinctively associate with an older world. It is one of those techniques that could only arise from an intertwining of need and primitive ingenuity, the cleverness of which never ceases to amaze any modern day observer. These are the skills that sustained life in a time when the most powerful machine was still built of flesh and bones. The secret to making these noodles, it appears, lies not in the order of procedure or technique of hand, but rather, the secret is contained within the very body of the noodlemaker himself. These noodles are pounded to a specific consistency by the exact weight of the man as he straddles the thick bamboo, bouncing back and forth across the table, using the leverage to spread the mixture into an even thickness. It is this incredibly visceral step of the process that renders these noodles so much more a craft piece than a product to be mindlessly consumed.

The man never spoke throughout the entire segment, probably because like so many ancient masters of their craft, he can find meaningful expression only through his actions while no length of fancy rhetoric can even come close to being comparatively honest.

From what I could tell, he seemed to live alone with his barrels of ingredients and his arsenal of thick bamboo shafts. They say he has no successor and like so many other master craftsmen of the past, will eventually give way to the products of modern industry. He will have no apprentice as he once was at a young age, eager to etch out a living any way he could, never dreaming that he'd come to give his entire life to something as fundamental to Asian cuisine as the Cantonese noodle.

His eventual death will be mourned by many, silent and unknowing.