YOU BE THE DOCTOR

By accident I discovered a site for medical professionals that invites the reader to make a diagnosis from a photograph and a few facts. Most of the respondants are doctors. It's a kind of game that they play. They all guess at the problem and suggest a treatment. After a flurry of comments the site's editor publishes the correct diagnosis.  I thought Theory Corner readers might like to try their hand at it. Here's a couple of cases:

THE PROBLEM: A 22 year-old man vacations in the tropics, and falls sick while on the plane coming back to the States. Above is the X-ray that shows what happened. Can you decipher it, and diagnose the problem?

DIAGNOSIS: The man was a "Mule" for heroin smugglers. He had several condoms filled with heroin in his stomach, large intestine and colon. One of them burst spilling a potentially lethal amount of the drug into his system.

I have to confess that I don't see any of that in the X-ray. I guess you have to have a trained eye.

DIAGNOSIS: The X-ray shows "miliary infiltrates" in both lungs, which I assume means fungus tendrils. About 5% of workers who clean up bat and bird droppings in a confined space get this problem.

DIAGNOSIS: Shingles. It's an intensely painful viral condition which you're vulnerable to if you had chicken pox when you were a kid. Usually it lasts only a few weeks, but it can also last a long time and cause blindness or paralysis. It's very important to get fast treatment. 

DIAGNOSIS: a ruptured spleen.  The abdominal organs most affected by traumatic injury to the side are the spleen and the liver. Even a small injury to the spleen can turn into something serious and cause a lot of internal bleeding. 

The kid's dad was smart to take him to the emergency ward right after the injury. Time is of the essence in cases like this. 

Interesting, huh? here's the site address:

http://boards.medscape.com/forums?128@226.ZMWEacWnd8L@.2a02a0d1!comment=1

WIVES FROM HELL

This is a post for the comedic storytellers on the site. No doubt you all have your favorite stereotypes which you pull out again and again. I love to talk about things like that, and if you're willing I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject. Just to get things started I'll share a few stereotypes of my own.

Here are my favorite Wives from Hell types. I've had absolutely nothing but good experiences with marriage but, let's face it, good experiences don't make for good stories. It's the rotten ones that readers want to hear about.  For that you need women like the ones below.

THE WITCH: You'd think evil women would be universally shunned and the trait would die out. Actually, it's just the opposite. Ordinary men are mesmerized by them. We're just putty in their hands. Go figure.

THE DOWNRIGHT UGLY: In real life very, very few women are ugly and the ones who are, are still better looking than their husbands. Even so, comedy writing requires ugly women as well as ugly men. It requires women in this category to be either lovably innocent, frustrated nymphomaniacs, or funny schemers who want to make the world pay for the bad treatment they receive.

FAT WOMEN: Comical fat wives can be either sweet or mean, but they should always be seen eating or wishing they were eating. This isn't true in real life, but fiction has its own rules.

THE ARGUMENTATIVE TYPE: There are no doubt legitimate reasons to argue, but this type of wife does it because she likes it. She was the one baby in twenty who came into the world genetically equipped with all the expressions, gestures, and sarcasm needed to put across a first-class rowel, and it's hard not to practice what you're good at. Fictional women like this always marry timid men.

THE CRAZY TYPE: I've never personally met anybody like this, but I know they exist because there's so many books and movies about them. I'm not thinking of people who are seriously disordered, but rather of those women with a heightened need for drama. They obsess over perceived slights by friends and co-workers.

Well, that should do for a start.


BTW: The Basil Wolverton girl was rendered in 3D by Colin Batty.

A NEARBY STAR GOES NOVA

Did you ever wonder what would happen if a nearby star went nova? What if it produced plasma jets the way some of them do, and we were in the way?

For one thing, our atmosphere would be stripped away. Giant thunderclouds (above) would cease to rain and would be sucked, layer after layer, into outer space. 

Water vapor (above) would be sucked from the land into the air.

Oceans (above) would dry up.

Where once there had been seabeds (above) there would now be vast stretches of arid desert.

Dust and loose soil (above) would be sucked into the air, creating dark clouds that would prevent any light from getting through.

Then even the clouds would also be sucked into space (above).

With the atmosphere, water and soil gone, and with no atmospheric shield to protect us from solar radiation, we'd quickly turn into a dead world like Mercury. It would all be very sad.........

........but that's something for our successors to worry about.

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All the black and white photography is by photo genius, Mitch Dobrowner. His work is for sale at:

http://www.photoeye.com/gallery/forms2/index.cfm?image=1&id=195494&imagePosition=1&Door=2&Portfolio=Portfolio5&Gallery=2&Page=

BETTE DAVIS AND VICTOR BUONO (PART 1)

These frame grabs are from "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Here ex-child star Bette Davis entertains a new boyfriend while her sister/prisoner, Joan Crawford, tries to escape upstairs. 

Wow! Bette looks great here (above). She's grotesque but the expressive acting shines through, even in a frame grab.

How do you like the lighting? PRO-fesh-eee-o-nal!

Above, a dainty sip from a cup, then.....

......Bette launches into a rant about modern music. She says they don't write music like they used to.

She says (above) she might have to re-enter show business to remind the world what real entertainment is.

Her gold digger boyfriend politely agrees.

Bette's (above) all fired up now. She's had this on her mind for a long time.

She (above) asks for her boyfriend's real opinion. She was a child star 75 years ago, and has never been on the stage since. Is it realistic to hope for a comeback?

With mock sincerity the boyfriend answers that it's never too late. Bette is ecstatic.

Delighted, she grabs his arm and offers to show him the sheet music for her old songs.

CONTINUED IN PART 2

BETTE DAVIS AND VICTOR BUONO (PART 2)

Above, Bette shows her boyfriend the sheet music.

They're interrupted by Joan Crawford screaming for help upstairs. Bette says her poor, sick sister gets delusional when she's hungry. She grabs her sister's meal (pre-prepared) and runs upstairs with it.

She gives her sister (above) the main course....

...which is (above) a big, ugly rat. Bette is not a nice guy in this film.

Joan screams....

Bette slaps her and runs downstairs.

Back in the living room (above), Bette does her childhood act with her boyfriend accompanying on the piano.

 You get the feeling that he's not really into it.

Bette ends on a high note.

 Not a minute too soon, it looks like.

It's time to discuss the boyfriend's "allowance."

Bette says it might be late this week. The boyfriend looks murderous.

Haw! Bette said it was just a joke!

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Well, that's all there's time for. The film is pretty dark, and for that reason never got the audience it deserved. That's too bad. It contains the best performance of Davis' later career.

WHAT DOES A MEMORY LOOK LIKE?

Every once in a while it's fun to think about thinking. Try this....sit in a comfortable chair and leisurely conjure up a memory of something. Try to be aware of the what the memory consists of. Is it a picture or a movie? Does the movie have sound? How distinct are the visuals? Can you entertain sound and pictures at the same time?

I just tried it and discovered that my memories consist mostly of still pictures and of movies that last for only a second. I can add sound, but it takes an effort to get sound and picture at the same time.

I conjured up my old high school (a facsimile above) and tried to remember what the students were like when sitting all together on the basketball court. I remember the boys punching each other on the arm til they were told to stop, and the general hub bub.

I was surprised to find that my memories weren't brightly colored. They came in desaturated tints, something like the picture above. If I focused on a color it brightened up, but when I turned my thoughts away again, it dimmed.

The memories were also pretty blurry. I couldn't make out the exact face and clothes of any one.

Come to think of it, they were VERY blurry. There were very few details....probably less than you see here (above).

The pictures didn't last long, either. I found that I couldn't keep a picture up to study it. My brain has no pause button. New pictures from different angles would appear, each with less fidelity to the original event than the first.

Of course I do vividly remember some details when I'm pressed (above).

Anyway, I believe the soupy memory was somewhat accurate, which is odd considering that the pictures were so fuzzy and ephemeral. Maybe the accuracy comes from something that was added to the pictures. Watching how the memory was constructed, I felt that a search had taken place, then a picture was put up, then a sort of emotional impression of the event was taken out of storage and combined with the picture.

Amazingly the non-visual, emotional impressions seemed to be the source for some of the movement I thought I saw. Sometimes I really didn't see that much movement in a single picture, I just strongly felt like I did.

Interesting, huh?

PULP PAPERBACK STYLE

Vintage paperback books had some great covers. I imagine they did a lot to sell the story to potential buyers. But...a good cover isn't enough. To really clinch the sale you need....

....you need a good back cover. The buyer wants to know if the writer can live up to the promise made on the front. In this case the front is pure poetry:

Fran's filmy attire made it necessary for her to remain behind the door until I had entered and she had closed it, secluding us for the night.

That's a great sentence. In lesser hands it might have started with the prosaic, "Fran remained behind the door...", but this writer knew what the reader wanted. He opened with the infinitely more atmospheric, "Fran's filmy attire..." Instantly we're brought to the thrilling moment when a girl who cares about us opens the door. 

Unfortunately the meandering blurb on the back doesn't live up to the front. 

Here's (above) a case where the back copy is better than the front:

Completely nude, she posed for the scandalous painting. Her affairs were the talk of the Congo.

It's hard to imagine the whole Congo being scandalized by anything in a painting, but who cares? You imagine drums spreading the message to every corner of the jungle that some crazy white woman with a cat posed buck naked for a picture. The author casts a spell that makes it all seem plausible.

 I think the same author did this teaser (above) for another book. Man, he had the knack!

The author didn't intend it, but I prefer to think of Forbidden Nectar (above) as the blonde's name. We're assured that when a man gets the taste of Forbidden Nectar, there's no turning back. 

Boy, the writer likes purple prose. Forbidden Nectar was on her way into the bubbling pit of destructive passion, while Forbidden Nectar's man was being sucked down into the whirlpool of destructive lusts. Imagine what it would be like if ordinary people talked like that in the street.

Geez, some of the words are beautiful but the plot sounds unfocused.

I've heard that college professors moonlighted as freelance writers for lurid books, and  these blurbs (above) seem to confirm that. Imagine the savage passion summoned up by academic rhetoric like:

Fearing community disgrace, she's chosen him for her consort, one to whom she could go for necessary affection.

Here's (above) a story full of Thrust about Maria, whose middle name was trouble, a real tropical hussy. The book promises to tell how hussies like Maria are made...what they do to people. It all sounds very steamy and sexy...but wait a minute...Maria turns out to be a hurricane, and the story is about The San Francisco Weather Bureau! Haw!

I like the title. It indicates that the story is not about something as prosaic as a storm, rather it's about the infinitely weird and menacing "StorM."