In the news

I thought there was no way that America's First Face Transplant Performed in Cleveland could be toppled from it's place as the-best-headline-I-saw-on-google-news-today until I saw Mickey Rourke in 'The Wrestler' will stomp on your heart.

Actually reading these articles only leads to disappointment. Go with your first impression and just make something up. My version of the first story is loosely based on the middle half hour of Face/Off with elements of feel good urban dancestravaganzas like Honey and Save the Last Dance thrown in. Added twist, the hotheaded dancer with a new face is mentored by a grizzled Cleveland Indians veteran played by Tom Berenger.

The Mickey Rourke story quite simply involves Mickey Rourke actually stomping on someone's heart.

Spiders on Drugs

I Don't Drink Milk

Zachary Taylor had his milk and cherries.
One of us is still alive.

Are you afraid of the dark?

Recently, I watched the History Channel's "The Unexplained: Hauntings," an A&E program that interviews three families who have lived in purportedly haunted houses as well as interviews with ghost experts and ghost skeptics. For me, it was the second family that reported the most fascinating haunted house tale. They claimed they saw a lit cigarrette hover by them in the air one night while they were eating dinner. They also had a psychic channel the angry ghost during a seyonce and the ghost, in a very threatening voice growled, "This is my property. Get out," as well as saying his name and what year he bought the property (all, the family found out via town records, were true). However, the icing on the cake was when the family would find crosses and the words "GO DEAD" scribbled on the interior walls of the house and on random scraps of paper. Absolutely horrifying. I think the one thing that the family didn't experience was having the piano played in an illogical manner in the dead of night. (This idea of a piano playing by ghost hands is one of the top most frightening things I can think of.) If they had a piano, though, I wouldn't have put it past this ghost to have gone wild with it.

My mom is always asking why I watch such shows when they scare me so much. My answer is always, I don't know. I have just always been fascinated by the magical and the surreal. I clearly remember stumbling upon "unicorn" hoofprints in the dust of the path that wound through a blueberry thicket in the back of my childhood log home. (Of course, I now know they were most likely deer hoofprints, but just maybe they were the genuine article?...) This powerful imagination of mine coupled with the fact that I was exposed to horror movies at a very young age (i.e. 3 years old) has instilled a deep, unshakeable, and oftentimes very illogical belief in the supernatural and all of its ghosts, hauntings, Sasquatch, little Nessie, etc. So of course, I'm easy to convince if you say you've seen a ghost.

But I really think I've seen a ghost. Or rather, I've seen strange things that I can't explain.

In 1998, when my family moved into our sprawling yellow farmhouse built in 1787, we all thought it was a creepy place. We loved how large it was, how everyone got their own bedroom (a first for me), the beautiful view of the Ossipees, and the woods and pond in our backyard, and yet there was a strange feeling that seemed trapped in the old place. It didn't help that most of the interior walls were painted barn red, brown, mustard yellow and army green, making the place even darker, heavier and more ominous. Places in the house that seemed especially off-putting were the old front hall (the large door leading to the old front hall shown above), the piano room, the dining room, the basement, and above all, the master bedroom. Friends who have visited tend to agree with this assessment.

We soon came to find out that the place had a substantial history: it was once part of the Underground Railroad, was the home of Governor Bean and fam way back when, and that old man Leighton who lived across the street sat down on the front porch sometime in the middle of the last century and drew his last breath. We found Indian shutters tucked inside the wood frames of the downstairs windows in the piano room (to pull in front of the windows if any Indians decided to attack you with arrows), and two long, musty sectioned-off places in the basement that were used primarily to store coal for the house and secretly for hiding runaway slaves. There was also an "unfinished" room in the basement that had a lone, naked bulb dangling by the doorway (by unfinished, I mean, a room that ran the length of the main house, was filled with sand, and was accessible through a rickety screen door). My family ended up using this sand to sprinkle on our icy driveway in the wintertime, but it was never a pleasant experience to lurk about in the basement alone, scooping shovelfuls of sand into a wheelbarrow that then had to be hauled up the basement stairs to the backyard. Even after living there for a decade, the unfinished room is nowhere near being cleared of sand. Finally, the house contained a secret passageway that wound from the smaller closet in the master bedroom (where you lifted up four attached, very inconspicuously cut boards to begin your descent), wound around the chimney down to the little closet (whose door was, oddly enough flush with the wall -- they were big on this feature in the old days) located in the old front hallway. Yes, a few of the siblings did try to successfully use the passage, but it was too sooty and very narrow for us to fully complete the journey. You would have to really want to hide to go in there.

We found turn-of-the-century binoculars, shoes, old cow bones, glass bottles for things like Lady Pinkham's, ink bottles still containing wet ink, loose goldleaf, schoolbooks circa the 1880s, newspapers dating 1906, an old horse harness, farm tools and broken china in the property's grounds, walls and ceilings. Among the more ominous discoveries, a ball-and-socket joint extracted from the basement walls by my brothers and a heavy, rough, square-shaped granite doorstop that when turned over was found to be half of a gravestone. I discovered this one day when, talking on the phone downstairs, I happened to look up at the ceiling (where we had used the doorstop to cover a temporary, coffee can-sized hole in the bathroom) only to see the inscription of dates and a last name carved elaborately into the stone.
In the decade my family lived there, the place was oftentimes a goldmine of history. Especially in those early days of living there, anywhere you looked, a once forgotten relic was staring you in the face. It was all very thrilling in the good sense of the word, except for the strange things that a few of us saw and all of us felt.

Historically, I have never slept soundly in the old farmhouse, be it nightmares or sleeplessness. The old farmhouse was (and still is, in my mind) a place that didn't seem to sleep. I hated waking up in the middle of the night, not knowing why I was suddenly so awake and too scared to open my eyes or get out of bed to turn on the light. I was scared mostly because I have always felt that you're never alone in the farmhouse, that you're always being watched. Naturally, my ability to overindulge in my imagination (as noted above) did not alleviate me of these feelings. But it was when I wasn't the only one with these convictions, that my fears seemed justifiable.

It started with the doorknobs. In the master bedroom, my parents started reporting that the doorknobs would turn back and forth for a few seconds and then the door would lazily open. I myself saw this one late night when we were all watching TV. I heard the sound of the doorknob turning back and forth, turned my head to see it doing just that and then the door slowly opening. I was dumbstruck. I asked my mom and my stepdad what the hell was that about, and they said it had been happening here and there but not to worry about it. My mom said she had holy water next to her bed, so she wasn't too scared. But I was sincerely shaken. And I didn't have Pope blessed holy water. After the doorknobs, my mom and stepdad said they began seeing strange balls of light moving about very independently in their bedroom, the upstairs bathroom, and the upstairs hallway. They were unexplainable primarily because there would be no lights on in the house save the soft green or red glow of the alarm clock numbers.

Finally, one late November afternoon, about a month after we had moved in I had my own little encounter. I was seated at the computer desk, which was at that time located in the master bedroom, a large window looking out on the backyard to my right and the door to the good-sized walk-in closet to my left. Unlike the other doors in the room (four, to be exact), this door had a latch instead of a doorknob, and while I was playing the Sims, I heard the sound of a latch going up and down very quickly. I turned my head only to see that what I had heard was exactly happening: the latch was indeed going up and down vigorously. This carried on for about 10-15 seconds more before, as with the doorknobs, the closet door slowly opened. It took me all about a second to realize that what I had seen was utterly unexplainable, and without further ado, dashed pell-mell from the room. Unfortunately, this was not a prank played by a devious little brother on his gullible, older sister as I was the only one home that afternoon.

Since that first year, the sightings have all but gone away. Other than that terrible, eery feeling I get in the previously noted rooms, the ghosts (if they're still there, or as some might say, if they were ever there) seem to like us now and so there are no more door knobs moving or unexplained lights drifting about the night.

However, this early spring, my mother did say she spotted a man walk briskly by the kitchen window heading for the ice house (a small outbuilding on the edge of the pond that once stored large blocks of ice that were kept cold with abundant amounts of sawdust). She assumed it was my stepdad, and the next day asked him what he was going to the ice house for at 10PM at night. He said he'd been in the house at that time. My brothers, too, claim it wasn't them. So maybe it was a figment of my mom's imagination? Maybe she only thought she saw a man walking outside? (our ice house pictured at right)

An interesting argument presented by a few of the the non-believers in the History Channel "Hauntings" video: We want ghosts, so we make ghosts or unexplainable things happen. They assert that our brain is powerful enough to create these things. I can understand them to a certain extent; after all, I am quick to believe, regrettably gullible, and genuinely love the idea of the supernatural, be it "Lord of the Rings" mythology or horror movies. However, when more than one or two people see the same thing at the same time, I'm reluctant to call it simple fiction.

So, what's your take on the whole ghost/supernatural thing? because I'd love to hear some stories.

*Note: If you have Netflix, you can instantly watch the above mentioned "Hauntings" movie. I definitely recommend it, if only for that second story which I didn't even tell the half of.

Flying Swings - Old Orchard Beach, Maine

What is your favorite amusement ride?

A Guide to Napping

Sleep tight.

I'm just as unsure on the the "how" end of it --

Bananas on the Brink

Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, reports that the banana as we know it may soon become a thing of the past.

Lack of genetic variation makes bananas especially susceptible to infection and Panama disease, the fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel banana of our grandparents generation, is now threatening the modern Cavendish banana. Read Koeppel's article Banana R.I.P for an excellent overview of the impending crisis.

For those interested in learning more about the fate of America's most popular fruit, Koeppel's website, bananabook.org, is a comprehensive resource for all banana related news and events.

"Monkey, Monkey Monkey, Raskolnikov"

Monkey Controls Robot With Mind - article and video

Doc Ock meets Outbreak?

If movies have taught me anything - and I believe they have - it's that experimental technologies will invariably be exploited for evil.

The New Humanities Initiative

Today in the New York Times:

New Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
...a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
Read the full article here

...also of interest in today's Times:

On The Trail, One Aide Looms Over Obama
...some unofficial rules have emerged between the candidate and his aide. From Mr. Obama: “One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”
Read the full article here

Let's Hear it for the Left!

I’ve always been fascinated with handedness. Only 10% of humans are left-handed, and being left-handed has some consequences for how the brain is organized. In lefties, language, a normally left-hemisphere dominant function, is more lateralized between both hemispheres of the brain – some even show a right-hemisphere dominance. While it is still unclear what effects these differences in cortical organization have on everyday functioning, it is possible that lefties, being wired a bit differently than 90% of the population, may have a few extra tricks up their sleeves.

With that being said, I was reading a popular press article about the handwriting styles of the candidates. While this stuff is probably a bunch of bunk, I thought it was fun to see that our two nominees (for all intents and purposes) are both left-handed. And, that four of our last six presidents were left handed (the exceptions being Bush Jr. and Carter).

Now we just have to hope that the left-leaning lefty becomes the next president.

Great Men in History: Edward Lorenz, PhD

Today, Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory and the man who popularized the "butterfly effect", died in Cambridge, MA at the age of 90. Click here to access his obituary.

Not surprisingly, literature and film have embraced the underlying ideas of chaos theory. My favorite post-modern play, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, focuses on the mathematics behind fractals during the 1800s and contemporary times. Chaos theory also plays a large role in the movie "Pi".

While searching the wikipedia page for chaos theory, it also mentions that chaos theory is mentioned in the films "The Butterfly Effect," "Chaos", and "The Science of Sleep." I haven't seen the other two, but I don't remember any mention of chaos theory in "The Science of Sleep" - does anyone else remember it?

Here's a cool webpage on fractals. The image above is also generated by fractals.

Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks

Yesterday, I finished reading Oliver Sacks’ most recent book Musicophilia. The book is a fascinating look at the patients Sacks has encountered in his forty-plus years as a neurologist. The specific theme is about brain injury and disease and developmental disorders that cause otherwise healthy people to experience music in unusual ways.

Sacks describes each case in wonderful detail which helps the reader connect with his patients. This book shows those with and without neuroscience backgrounds the amazing possibilities of the human mind and how music seems to be more deeply encoded in our memory and minds than our own day-to-day life experiences.

Some of the most amazing cases concern Williams Syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder that causes mental retardation, heart problems, and usual facial features. Individuals with William’s Syndrome are extremely friendly, have large, fluent vocabularies, and often have a passionate love of music. One woman with an IQ of 70 (which is the cutoff for mental retardation) is a professional opera singer with a repetoire of over 2000 songs in 35 languages, yet she cannot add 5 and 3.

Some other phenomena/disorders discussed in the book are musical hallucinations, absolute pitch, amusia, amnesia, aphasia, Alzheimer’s, synesthesia, autism, and Parkinson’s disease.

"I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it." - Robert Sapolsky

I think that this has always been my philosophy, but it took the right amount of time and self-reflection to come to this conclusion. For those of you wary of science yet still curious about what science may have to offer us concerning the complexity and mystery of the human condition, I suggest checking out any of Oliver Sacks’ books. My other favorites are The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The Island of the Colorblind, and An Anthropologist on Mars.