Reyna Favis's Blog, page 6
April 29, 2018
Introvert Asks: Exorcism — Is There an App For That?
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It’s finally happened—the Rite of Exorcism is now only a phone call away. In 1999, the Vatican issued the first revision of the rite since 1614. Having dealt with regulated documents in the pharmaceutical industry, I wonder if the 1614 version of the rite had finally accumulated so many planned and unplanned deviations over 385 years that management was at last convinced to revise the document. Where I come from, revision or review of SOPs was on a mandatory two year schedule, so the Vatican is functioning under some pretty questionable practices. Given this lapse, I worry if the Vatican’s process owner for the rite can be sure of version control, so that no one will accidentally be working with the 1614 version. And did they appropriately re-train all users and is this documented? Also, are the holy water, crucifixes and relics in current use calibrated to NIST standards? Finally, does the Vatican have an independent Quality Assurance unit to perform audits of their processes and documents? Because that might be a pretty cool job. And it appears that things continue to change with the Rite of Exorcism, so oversight is warranted.
In 2017, the Vatican approved an English version of the rite created by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The translation was developed to simplify the recruitment of priests who could assist with an exorcism, given that facility with Latin is fading, even among the clergy.
I have reviewed the verbal elements of the Rite of Exorcism (English version kindly provided by Catholic Online) and I’m pretty sure I could write a chatbot that could reduce the hands-on time required by the clergy. Recently, I created the world’s first Plott Bot, a chatbot that communicates in the voice of a delightfully humorous, archetypal Plott Hound. (From the Plott Bot: “Stuff I like to talk about? My extremely rare moments of misbehavior, fun things to do, sleeping, hunting, eating, toys, matters of personal hygiene and bodily functions, my interactions with you, my mysterious past and Plott superiority. Or you can try to surprise me.”)
In terms of using the Plott Bot as a marketing strategy, the verdict is still out, but not looking good. By posting news of the Plott Bot to several Facebook groups for Plott Hound enthusiasts, I have succeeded in driving traffic to my author website—over 300 new visitors in about a week. These folks represent a potential niche market, since a Plott Hound plays a major role as a psychopomp in the Zackie Stories, escorting the dead to the afterlife. Unfortunately, it appears that Plott enthusiasts do not buy books: I witnessed no uptick in sales following the release of my chatbot. But it’s early days yet with the Plott Bot, so maybe given more time and exposure, the sales will eventually trickle in.
Perhaps I should consider writing a new book series that involves exorcism, since a much larger market exists among those who believe themselves to be possessed. According to the BBC, an estimated half a million people seek exorcisms each year in Italy alone, and the demand for exorcisms worldwide is growing. This is obviously a growth sector that will keep priests busily employed for years to come.
To keep up with demand, the newest addition to the Rite of Exorcism is the introduction of a cellphone to the exorcist’s kit. A cellphone allows for remote support by an assisting priest, who can recite the prayers and/or responses over the phone. Presumably, if the exorcism does not take, the next step would be to provide deskside support to the end user.
During that dark period when I desperately needed an exorcist to deal with the nasty Cocker Spaniel ear, it would have been extremely useful to be able to hit speed dial and summon prayers of support. And if the Pope learns of my pioneering work with the Plott Bot, who knows? Maybe some day soon, a chatbot will answer that call or text.
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Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_de_Borja_y_el_moribundo_impenitente.jpg
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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).
Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.
If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.
If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.
April 27, 2018
Publisher’s Weekly / BookLife Review of SOUL SEARCH
After a competitive process to get this review and after a long, long wait — the Publishers Weekly/BookLife review for SOUL SEARCH is finally published. “Favis handles the paranormal aspects with aplomb…Readers will look forward to the soul-saving trio’s further adventures.” https://booklife.com/pwreview/225879
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April 11, 2018
SOUL SCENT Book Trailer
HUZZAH! For your viewing pleasure, using an excerpt from the story, a new SOUL SCENT book trailer has just been released.
March 30, 2018
Introvert’s Guide to Immortality in the Digital Afterlife
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What if the last words said about a person are not the eulogy? Whatever is said as someone’s mortal remains are laid to rest is probably the nicest things anyone will ever say. Faults and failings are overlooked and only the good things are remembered. Now, all this heartwarming and nostalgic reminiscence will be ruined as modern science looks for a way to bring back the consciousness of the dearly departed.
Of the current approaches to technological resurrection, the least offensive is one geared towards comforting the survivors. An article in WIRED tells the story of James Vlahos and his efforts to keep his father alive in silico. Using conversational computing, Vlahos aimed to create a chatbot that would emulate his father by drawing on transcribed conversations the two had in the months preceding his father’s death from metastatic lung cancer. The conversations amounted to 91,970 words, or 203 single-spaced pages of 12-point font. Not a lot from which to recreate a personality… Fortunately, Vlahos’s father had a unique way of expressing himself, employing jokingly pretentious language and a wry sense of humor. Programming the chatbot with this idiosynchratic speech pattern helped to create the illusion of engaging in a conversation with his father. Overall, the chatbot proved jarring to those who were close to Vlahos’s father (“It is very weird to have an emotional feeling, like ‘Here I am conversing with John,’ and to know rationally that there is a computer on the other end”), but helped to preserve the memory of the man for his grandchildren.
As an introvert, the thought of having to make idle small talk, even as a post mortem emulation, is unacceptable. I hereby declare my intent never to be resurrected as a chatbot. If anyone in my lineage tries to do this for any reason, I promise to find a way to haunt you.
But back to the technology…
Another method of digital immortality has been recently pitched as a startup company, a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal.” The gist of the idea is that a client will be euthanized by being pumped full of embalming-like chemicals while close to death, but still alive. A living brain is essential to the process, since the chemicals serve to preserve the brain in microscopic detail, and a dead brain will have been damaged by the process of dying. Unlike cryonics, where heads or bodies are frozen after death with the wild hope that death can be fixed in the future, the preserved brain will not be brought back to life. The preserved brain is viewed as a computer that has been turned off, but still contains information. Preserving the brain will allow scientists in the future to retrieve information that’s present in the brain’s anatomical layout; specifically, they’ll map the connectome — all the connections (a.k.a synapses) between all the neurons — to recreate a person’s consciousness and then upload this into a computing environment.
Sounds nifty, but neuroscientists are advising investors to be highly skeptical of this approach. The connectome is necessary, but not sufficient to encode memory and/or consciousness (whatever that is). Sam Gershman, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard University, reminds folks that things are a lot more complicated: “You need to know the synaptic strengths, if they’re excitatory/inhibitory, various time constants, what neuromodulators are present, the dynamical state of dendritic spines. And that’s all assuming that memories are even stored at synapses!”
Michael Hendricks, a neuroscientist at McGill University, sums up my feelings on digital immortality through brain preservation: “Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems? I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.”
Because, really, what do we have to offer the future? In a society capable of resurrecting a person from bits of brain matter, any skills or knowledge possessed by we, the ancient ancestors, will be useless in such a technologically advanced culture. What could prove especially embarrassing are the quaint and horrifying beliefs from the present (…at least, I hope the future will have matured away from our current state of childishness and selfishness).
Currently, a lot of historical bad behavior is excused and glossed over. He was a man of his times. People say this when they are confronted by some unpalatable truth about an ancestor. Most of us (but, based on recent events, not all of us) would quickly flip the page on the genealogical chart when we find some despicable person in our lineage who earned a living by unscrupulous means, e.g. capturing other people and selling them into slavery. Similarly, our present-day failures to do the right thing because there was a little bit of money involved will bring shame to our descendants.
In Soul Search, Cam explains to Fia the guiding principle in dealing with those who have passed on: “As in life, so in death. If someone is a bastard in life, unless there is some epiphany that leads to a sudden conversion before death, it is likely that he will also be a bastard in death.”
If digital resurrection becomes widespread, we all run the risk of becoming ‘that’ ancestor, the one that makes descendants cringe at the thought of sharing genetic material and fabricate reasons why they might have been adopted. And our newly resurrected consciousness would happily display the demons of our worse nature, being totally out of step with the ethos of the future.
Yes, I ate the flesh of other sentient beings. We didn’t have nutrient replicators and, quite frankly, they were delicious. [Descendant backs away and retches.] And, yeah, medical care was a privilege for those who could afford it. Lots of people died from stuff that could have been treated. Oh, and sorry about what we did to the environment. We figured you guys would be smart enough to fix it all and doing something at the time would have been a hassle for us. [Descendant snarls and violently switches off animator housing our consciousness.]
Mortality is a gift to future generations. Use it wisely.
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Photo credit: PIT Bioinformatics Group (Budapest Reference Connectome)
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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).
Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.
If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.
If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.
February 27, 2018
Introvert Wisdom: If you like it, put a review on it (with apologies to Beyoncé)
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Phil Rickman’s The Wine of Angels has planted the seed for my next obsession. I need to read this series. The main character, Merrily Watkins, is a single mother and a stress-induced chain smoker, who occasionally gives in to swearing when provoked. She is also the vicar of a small English village who is on a path to becoming an exorcist, dispelling dark influences and cleansing the residue of acts that leave a mark upon the present. The author does a wonderful job building elements of local folklore into the story, presenting it as almost a half-forgotten generational memory in those village families whose roots reach deep. The supernatural steadily and insidiously creeps into the story, allowing the reader to gradually suspend disbelief as the author deftly intertwines the disappearance of a difficult and rebellious teenage girl with the suspicious suicide of a 17th-century clergyman, hounded by the village and accused of witchcraft. Rickman skillfully weaves threads of the past and the present with the sacred and the commonplace, creating a story that leaves the reader satisfied, but with a sense that deep mysteries exist just out of reach, on the periphery of the mundane.
In addition to being a thumping good read, this book has also proven to be a study in strange reviews that readers post. Frankly, it makes me worry. The Wine of Angels has just shy of one hundred reviews on Amazon, a number that I would dearly like to see for the Zackie Stories. One reader awarded the novel only two stars because the Merrily character named her daughter Jane, yet called her by a pet name throughout the story. I admit this review left me slack-jawed. A 1-star review complains that Merrily is not the type of clergyperson she is interested in because the character smokes, swears and has trouble relating to her teenaged daughter. This review brought tears to my eyes because, um, that’s what makes the character believable. There are other 1-star reviews posted that criticize the work as being too slow-moving for their tastes. Here, I can only blame Twitter, but each to their own. This, at least, is a reasonable reason to dislike a book.
Maybe it’s an introvert thing or maybe it’s a writer thing, but my personal approach to reviews is not to poo all over someone else’s work. If I like something, I’ll leave a rating at the very least, writing a little something for the stories that proved enjoyable, and writing deeper reviews for the one’s that allowed me to live through the events with the characters. To give fellow authors additional exposure, I’ve also blogged about some books (here, here and here, to name a few) when I found areas of overlap with my experiences. If I don’t like a book, it’s entirely possible that I simply wasn’t in the mood for the story or it shaped up to be something that elicited an emotional response, but not one I found pleasing. That’s still an accomplishment, being able to use words to engage other people’s emotions. Someone else might find the story to be exactly what they were looking for and I wouldn’t want them to turn away because an author’s work wasn’t my thing.
I’ll especially make a point to write a review if an author offered her work as a giveaway and reading it gave me some moments of respite from my news feed. It’s the least I can do after an author spent months to years creating a work and all he wants in return for a free read is a review. It’s just good manners to reciprocate.
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For books that really need additional work (e.g. poor editing that prevents a reader from engaging in the story, problems of continuity, or plot holes)… I’ll be honest here: I revert to laziness. I usually just stop reading and move on, never rousing myself to warn an unsuspecting reader not to pay their hard-earned money for a poor product. Mea culpa. But given that there are many, many people on the internet who desperately want to spew venom, I figure one or more of these folks will eagerly take on this burden.
Brutal reviews, deserved or not, are part and parcel of the writing life. I don’t look forward to it, but I accept it and I’m perfectly willing to consider thoughtful criticism. While it’s hard to accept the posts that just leave poor ratings with no justification, what I fear most are the nonsensical reviews that will inevitably be posted. Nonsensical reviews and empty ratings contribute to the average star rating associated with a book on Amazon and Goodreads, and many people use this metric to decide if a book is worth reading. Because they never delve into the content of the reviews to determine if the star rating is justified, the author is unfairly penalized by this system. John Eidswick, author of The Language of Bears, wrote a blog post detailing the toxic effects of nonsensical reviews on book sales. After receiving a number of glowing reviews, his sales took a cliff dive after two people posted 1-star reviews, pretty much admitting that they didn’t even read the book! Authors work on very slim margins, so this outcome can be financially devastating.
The moral of the story is that if you want to continue to read books that appeal to you, if you want the authors you like to survive, write a review to swamp out the crazies. Much appreciated.
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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook.
Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.
If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.
If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before March 31st.
January 31, 2018
The Introvert, Post-operative Delirium and Goats
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My name is Reyna and I have a goat obsession. It seemed like a harmless eccentricity, so I never mentioned it to the doctors. But I wasn’t always this way.
It all started in 2011, when I had two surgical procedures separated by a few months. Both procedures required general anesthesia and produced interesting cognitive effects upon waking. Prior to that fateful year, I had had no experience with general anesthesia and had no reason to assume my mental processes would be in any way affected when I came to.
The first time I awoke, I heard Zydeco music playing faintly in the background. I found it odd that someone in a hospital environment would be playing music loud enough to be heard in the patient rooms, but it wasn’t unpleasant, so I lay back and listened. Because I was not familiar with Zydeco, the unusual music held my attention. I distinctly heard fiddle and accordion and I remember thinking that, given my circumstances, it was good that the compositions were upbeat and happy. When I noticed that the music would come and go as the heating system turned on and off, I just figured that the sound was being carried through the vents. Someone in some distant room in the hospital was responsible for the unexpected entertainment. But once the room temperature was steady and the blower was no longer necessary, the broadcast was taken over by the white noise from the equipment in the room. Oh, that ain’t right, I thought.
The second time I went under, I woke up thinking how much I liked goats. I really, really liked goats. I knew I didn’t have this deep affection before the operation, but I was nonetheless unperturbed and just went with it. By this time, the Zydeco music had faded for the most part and I only heard it occasionally when there was a source of white noise, so I figured the goat thing would also go away in time. Didn’t happen.
In the coming weeks, I bought a book on the care and feeding of goats. Fortunately for my husband Rich, we were not zoned for goats, so I was unable to fully indulge in the goat fantasy. When I returned to work, I made a goat screensaver and wallpaper for my computer. Shortly after this, departmental operations moved from the east coast to the west and my team and I were laid off. I worked as scientific director at a major pharmaceutical company, and you might call it paranoia, but I have lingering concerns that the operational transition was somehow influenced by the goat presence on my work computer. Human resources never said anything specific about the goats and, like the others caught up in this disaster, I was sent for re-education at a job transition agency. The re-education was supposed to get me to think more broadly about next steps and future employment. Little did they know…
When Dave, the facilitator at this agency, asked me about my thoughts on what to do next, I brought up goat farming. Dave’s eyes bugged out and he became excited. It turned out that when he lost his job, he cobbled together a collection of employment opportunities to earn an income: facilitating sessions at the job transition agency, teaching at a community college and—wait for it—goat farming. Rich and I ended up visiting Dave’s farm, playing with the goats and buying some very delicious cheese. The reality of goats completely lived up to the fantasy, so I was not cured by this experience. Unable to start my own farm due to zoning restrictions, I went on to write the Zackie Stories, incorporating something about goats into each of the two books in this growing series, and occasionally subverting a blog post with a caprine reference.
Lest you think that brain abnormalities following surgical procedures are rare or specific only to my cognitive processes, Science Magazine, one of the premier journals in the scientific literature, recently published a disturbing article related to this phenomenon. A caveat to keep in mind while considering this report is that the human studies cited lack proper control. Because it’s unethical to withhold necessary surgeries from some people just to create a control group for comparisons to those who had surgery, solid conclusions are a bit iffy for this stuff.
In the summary article “Will surgery sap your brain power?,” the authors examine the potential causes and consequences of cognitive issues following surgery the required general anesthesia. Postoperative delirium involves symptoms of delusion, confusion, and hallucination that usually fade quickly (or not, to wit, my goat obsession). Postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD), on the other hand, involves difficulties with memory, attention, and concentration. Again, this can be temporary and last only months, or the deficit can remain for a lifetime. Anecdotal stories imply that the elderly are particularly at risk for dwindling mental abilities following surgery. The elderly, already potentially struggling with mental decline, can be pushed over the edge and enter a postoperative delirium from which they never emerge. The data to support this notion, however, are equivocal.
Trying to get a grip on this phenomenon is difficult for a variety of reasons. As mentioned above, prospective case-control studies in humans are impossible to perform for ethical reasons. Also, the true frequency of these events is difficult to pin down because there is no official diagnostic criteria (but some studies suggest these impairments are disturbingly common). In addition, the type of operation has an effect—heart surgery patients suffer most frequently from cognitive decline, while bariatric surgery patients surprisingly become mentally sharper. Feeding into the type of surgery a patient requires is the effect of their pre-existing condition. For example, heart disease takes its own toll on the brain. Elderly patients, meanwhile, may have mild cognitive impairment (a frequent precursor to Alzheimer’s disease) prior to the operation. In either case, these patients may have declined anyway, with or without anesthesia or surgery. Teasing out these confounding factors is not simple, but the researchers need to do this in order to determine if surgery and/or anesthesia is accelerating mental decline.
There are a few hypotheses to explain why surgery under general anesthesia might cause cognitive decline. One possibility is that surgery reduces blood flow to the brain and deprives this organ of oxygen. But wouldn’t the experience of POCD be universal if this were the explanation, albeit with variations in intensity due to pre-existing conditions that affect blood flow?
Another hypothesis is that anesthesia itself is screwing up the brain. “Awake Under Anesthesia,” a recent article in The New Yorker, delves into how “people can hear things while under anesthesia, and can be affected by what they hear even if they can’t remember it.” If this is the case, it begs the question of what in the world my surgical team was up to while I was under. But back to anesthesia—this substance also has documented biological effects. It’s known that neurons in a culture dish can be killed by exposure to anesthesia and that animal brains will develop abnormally if exposed. Perhaps we awake from surgery with a mild brain damage and it’s not just chemically-suppressed memories of surgical suite antics.
The hypothesis du jour to explain POCD and delusions is that surgery unleashes a body-wide inflammation, which then infiltrates the brain, particularly in the elderly. Evidence from both brain imaging studies in humans and memory studies in animals appear to support this idea.
For me, it could have been worse. I don’t do well on opioids. I’ve never been genotyped, but I suspect I’m a poor metabolizer for these drugs and get all the nausea and dizziness without the benefit of significant pain relief. Once the medical staff saw my impersonation of the possessed little girl in The Exorcist, I got a whole lot of anti-inflammatory drugs instead of the usual opioids. This change in medication might have prevented more serious cognitive problems than hallucinating Zydeco music or developing a goat obsession. Something to consider. With a little more brain inflammation, who knows what I’d be writing? As my brain function inevitably declines with age, maybe we’ll find out. Things could get interesting.
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Photo credit: George Chernilevsky – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8002106
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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook.
Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.
If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.
If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before February 28th.
January 21, 2018
Amazon Special Jan 21-25 2018
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I’m running a special promotion from Jan 21-25. For this period only, you can get both books on Amazon Kindle for only $0.99. You will need to click on each book individually: SOUL SEARCH is $0.99 and SOUL SCENT is free.
December 30, 2017
Readying for the New Year Introvert-Style
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Is it 2018 already? I am behind on my writing…
To ready myself for the New Year’s Eve festivities and to prepare for writing the Scotland portion of the story in the upcoming Zackie Story, SOUL SIGN, I’ve been studying RBN Bookmark’s guest post. To quote RBN: “… the further north you travel it seems the wiser people become, so it`ll come as no surprise when I say the Scots are undoubtedly amongst the wisest in the British Isles.” And despite cultivating a reputation for being aloof and dour, a recent culture map created by Cambridge University describe Scots as being extraverted. But heck, no one is perfect.
Hogmanay is the Scots word for the last day of the year. In the not too distant past, rituals were carried out to ensure fertility and also to divine the success of the coming year. If the first visitor to the house on New Year’s Day was a tall, dark and handsome man, the coming year would have a good outcome. If, on the other hand, the visitor was a short, red-haired woman, this would predict a poor outcome. In my opinion, if anyone saw her coming, it’s unlikely she would make it through the door. The symbolism of the gifts brought for the visit also had predictive power. Corn, oats, grass and water (and later, coal and shortbread) would guarantee a steady supply of food and fuel to the household in the coming year.
And what would the New Year be without a bit of pyromania? The burning of the clavie at Burghead now takes place on January 11th instead of the last day of December thanks to the change in calendar in the eighteenth century. It is a great way to set fire to the town. The clavie is a half tar barrel mounted on a six-foot long fisherman’s pole. Fuel for the impending conflagration is provided courtesy of broken cask staves and chunks of tarred wood. Once lit, against all OSHA regulations, the clavie is paraded through the town to the nearby hill — the Doorie — where it is incorporated into a larger bonfire. If you would like a talisman of good luck for the coming year, you can pick up pieces of burnt wood once the flames die down. But what if Burghead’s brand of community hell fire is too civilized for your tastes? There’s always Shetland, with its distinctive Norse heritage, and a celebration called Up-Helly-Aa. These folks start their festivities with a torch-lit procession through the town led by Vikings and ends with igniting a replica longship. Tamely dropping a ball in Times Square just can’t compete with an event reminiscent of a Viking funeral.
Are standing stones your thing? On New Year’s Day in Orkney, young couples who wanted to live together outside of religiously sanctioned wedded bliss visited the Stone of Odin, part of a larger assembly called the Stones of Stenness. Handfasting was accomplished through a non-religious but ritualized ceremony, involving kneeling, walking and praying and culminating in the couple clasping their hands through a hole in the stone. Offerings of bread, cheese and rags were left at the stone and the couple was then committed to live together for a year and a day. The arrangement was recognized by the community, but if the couple decided to separate, they did this by leaving Stenness Church by different doors. No muss, no fuss, no lawyers. All was well with this ceremony until 1814 when a tenant farmer, one Captain MacKay (the original “Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!” curmudgeon), decided he’d had enough of people trespassing. He broke the Stone of Odin and destroyed the circle. Only four of the original twelve Stones of Stenness survive. Jerk.
And last but not least, peripheral tuberculosis lymphadenitis, a.k.a. scrofula. (Surprise! Bet you weren’t expecting that.) This is a nasty-looking, bluish-purple swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck caused by a Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection (in 95% of adult cases; other Mycobacterium species can also more rarely cause it). Historically, people contracted scrofula from unpasteurized milk, but modern milk preparation has virtually eliminated this disease. Prior to the availability of antibiotics, cures were sought by visiting the Rose Well near Livingston at sunrise on New Year’s Day. A cure was effected by drinking some of the water, walking around the well three times in a sunwise direction, and leaving a small votive offering. As much as I like Scotland, I’ll stick with pasteurized milk and, if necessary, antibiotics.
Wishing everyone a happy and healthy 2018!
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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the books, author appearances, send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook.
Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited. If you enjoy the stories, please leave a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads.
If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before January 31st.
November 30, 2017
The Introvert Versus the Nasty Cocker Spaniel Ear
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George the Cocker Spaniel was originally introduced in a previous post that told you all about the introverted Plott Hound, Zackie-O. George is typical of his breed, strongly attached to his family and perennially cheerful, forever wagging his stumpy little tail. This story gets more interesting when you consider that when I bring a dog to the vet, it is not the Plott Bear Hound who needs to wear a muzzle. For the last few weeks, I’ve been doing battle with a slow-moving ear problem, also typical of the breed. Cockers have huge, heavy ears with an abundance of hair growing around the ear canal. Because there is very little air flow under these flappers, Cocker ears are at constant risk for developing unhealthy blooms of bacteria, yeast or both. In the case of George, despite a recent vet visit for a wellness check and despite following the vet’s advice to clean his ears once a week, he developed an infection in his right ear.
The infection was a thing of pure evil, though George remained cheerful and did not seem overly bothered by it. I was not so cheerful. It is rare that some life event causes me to rethink my lazy, irreligious approach to life, but there it was — I needed a priest and fast. Based on the smell, this was an obvious case of demonic possession. Animals are said to be more sensitive to the unseen world, and if you believe the responses from the two cats in the house, George was besieged by a legion of devils. Like most dogs, Zackie-O is normally drawn to stinky things, yet even she gave me the baleful hound face when George sat too close to her. Fix this, please, Mama her eyes seemed to plead. When George buddied-up to my husband Rich on the couch, I again got the pleading eyes, but this time, they were also watering. “You seriously need to do something,” he muttered, trying not to inhale. I launched into an explanation that my superpower was fixing toilets, not digging out heinous gunk from Cocker Spaniel ears, but no one in our house was having it.
In the absence of a priest, I muzzled poor George and cleaned out the heinous gunk using the squirt bottle of ear cleanser the vet had provided, a whole lot of ear wipes and a bunch of Q-tips. That helped some, but there were dried bits of discharge caught in his ear hair and though I tried mightily to remove these with the ear cleanser and scissors (even uttering at one point “The power of Christ compels you!”), I got nowhere with them. These clumps were beyond me and they remained a potent reminder of and contributor to the horrible stench.
In the continued absence of a priest, the next best thing was the dog groomer at Petco. I took George for his regular appointment with the hope that after they worked their dark magic, I might return home with a sanctified and blessed Cocker Spaniel. To my everlasting horror, we were turned away and told to go to the vet.
With a priest still nowhere in sight, we were lucky to get a same-day appointment with the vet, who raised a delicate eyebrow when I told her what the groomer said. “Oh, did they now?” was all she said. George was again muzzled, his ear rinsed and squished and wiped. The dried clumps were removed with shears — according to the vet, the only way known to humankind to remove them. She might have used some holy water during the process, but I looked away for some of it, so I can’t say for sure. I was sent on my way with a small bottle of antibiotic and told to give George’s ear two drops twice a day.
George and I survived the ear fiasco because, after dealing with pets for many years, I have become increasingly resistant to disgusting things. Recognizing the utility of this trait, I have passed it on to Fia, the main character in Soul Search and Soul Scent. The poor woman regularly deals with all manner of unpleasant things in her role as servant to the Psychopomp and also in her day job, working for a company responsible for crime scene cleanup. If it disgusts you, Fia is likely inured to it. It is worth mentioning that the universality of the things that are likely to disgust us actually has a scientific basis.
According to an article by the BBC, all humans exhibit the same facial expression when demonstrating disgust — we screw up our noses and pull down the corners of our mouths. People also generally find the same sort of things to be disgusting and ‘yuck,’ the verbal expression for disgust, is a proto-word, similar in languages all over the world. The thought is that disgust is hardwired in our brains because it is crucial to our survival, helping us to avoid things that could cause disease. There is even a growing body of evidence that some phobic disgust responses are triggered because of the need to avoid poisonous animals. One news report cites that up to 16% of people “become viscerally upset after looking at images of clustered holes, according to the first-ever study on the condition known as trypophobia.” The hole pattern is thought to be significant because of the prevalence of such patterns on certain poisonous species, e.g. the king cobra, blue-ringed octopus, the box jellyfish, the Brazilian wandering spider and the deathstalker scorpion. (This one surprised me, since I apparently have a very mild form of trypophobia, having an aversion to honeycomb-like patterns with very specific distances between cells. [I won’t run if I see this, but I might make that particular face described above.] I thought this was just me. I had no idea others had similar aversions.)
But not all forms of disgust are genetically programmed. Take, for instance, food choices from around the world. The Washington Post points out that many societies happily feast on food sources that others would never consider, except under conditions of starvation. Obviously, some forms of disgust are culturally acquired.
My guess is that the aroma emerging from George’s ear would rank as a genetically programmed form of disgust, at least for those with no mutations in their olfactory receptors. (For those of you interested, this is known as epistasis, where unrelated genes can interact and one gene can mask the effect of another. Yay, science.) Most people would be programmed to avoid the possible disease-causing agents associated with Cocker Spaniel ear infections. Despite this dalliance with George’s nasty ear, as a card-carrying introvert, I am proud to say that I have some protection from infectious disease. The introvert predilection for alone time unwittingly removes us from many situations where disease can be spread. Yay, introversion.
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No Cocker Spaniels were harmed in the making of this post.
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