Chawneys, Bad Teeth, and Other Elements of British TV

To combat the boredom of being housebound, after reviewing my work-related material until I can outline it from memory, I have taken up the hobby of watching Youtube videos.  I've discovered a world of Youtube sensations, some of whom are sensational only to me.*

I've also discovered an abundance of British programming and documentaries. I discovered The Jeremy Kyle Show, which has a bit of a  Jerry Springer/Steve Wilkos format but with a snarky British twist. Jeremy Kyle openly mocks the guests on his show. I'm curious as to how much Kyle's producers have to pay their guests in order to get them to humiliate themselves on national T.V. Plenty of people in the U.S. seem more than willing to do it practically for free, but I would expect the British on average to possess a bit more dignity than the trailer trash Jerry Springer/Judge Alex/Dr. Phil/ Judge Judy clientele. There was supposedly a time in the history of the U.S. in which a person could only be found humiliating himself or herself on TV on perhaps The Newlywed Game or The Amateur Hour. Then came The Gong Show**, and the rest was history. Programming in which people willingly air their dirty laundry and/or expose their two-digit IQs is probably more available now than is scripted programming. I'm not certain what if anything that says about our society other than that it's damned tough to turn away from a train wreck.

One of my Youtube discoveries was the British documentary series The Nightmare Neighbor Next Door.  It's an ideal series for Britain, because it seems that the British middle class lives in closer proximity to neighbors than does the American middle class anywhere other than in New York City.  Even though the British might, for the most part, conduct themselves with ever so slightly more civility than do their American or Aussie counterparts, proximity and familiarity would seem to provide an exceptional breeding ground for contempt. 
Where only in  the U.S. could a reality program be made featuring the repossession of cars, only in Great Britain could a quality program featuring neighbors hating on each other provide entertainment. If the "nightmare neighbor" concept were used as a reality TV plot in the U.S. or Australia, the warring factions would probably kill each other before any decent footage was obtained. Besides that, there's something about hearing neighbors rag on each other with snooty British accents that makes it all the more delectable.

It was while watching The Nightmare Neighbor Next Door that I discovered the Chawney Family. They were the first set of residents I saw whose neighbors turned on them in an ugly but understandable way.  The Chawney family featured two parents and their two twenty-something daughters. Their son -- older than his sisters -- lived elsewhere. The family had two dogs (one especially obnoxious pooch had an especially shrill and yappy bark that could be heard continually for most of the day and night; I'm not sure when the animal slept), two cats, and two birds.  Neighbors complained that the family members fought with one another constantly, that they yelled at their animals, that the animals made constant noise and that, on the rare occasions that dogs were taken out, no one picked up their poo. The straw that metaphorically broke the neighbors' camel's back happened when Emma, the older of the two daughters, decided to audition for The X Factor, and frequently practiced her singing in the street outside the family's home at 3:00 a.m. It was the twilight hour rehearsals that ultimately provided the ammunition for the neighbors to have the family evicted.

The video features Emma's initial appearance on The X Factor. She returned the following year. As a kindness to my readers, I will offer the caveat that the video might not be suitable for the pitch-sensitive among us***. I do not own the video and sincerely hope not to have affronted the video's owner by sharing it in this blog.

A both figurative and literal un-thickening of the plot came about when the family appeared on some British program focusing on weight loss and fitness for the morbidly obese. The combined weight of the four family members was at one time reported to have totaled either eighty-three stone or ninety-three stone depending upon which report one chooses to believe.. (A stone equals fourteen pounds. I'll allow you to do the math.) I'm not sure  how many different programs on which members of the family were featured, but they became quite the national celebrities of the "famous for being famous" ilk. I supposed they could be described a Great Britain's version of our Kardashians.

My viewing of The Nightmare Neighbor Next Door and other British programming prompted me to ask the age-old and oft-asked question of why it is that more British than American or Australian people appear to have unsightly teeth. I googled the topic. it seems that the British have become sensitive regarding what they see as a stereotype concerning the state of dentition among their population. Studies have been conducted [by Brits] recently, the findings of which have disputed the stereotype. Those who conducted the studies compared the teeth of Great Britain's middle class to the teeth of the U.S.'s present and former methamphetamine addicts and found the British teeth to be both cosmetically and structurally superior to those of the U.S. meth addicts. They concluded, therefore, that the popular perception equating British middle class with bad teeth is nothing more than a myth. Right.

In an equally scientific study conducted by yours truly in the days since my malleolus was fractured, I have viewed equal numbers of episodes of Supernanny (US) and Supernanny (UK) and have compared the teeth of those featured on the respective programs. The teeth of the British middle class truly are worse than those of the american middle class. In an equally scientific study, I consulted scholarly periodicals to determine that the families of the British royals and even the commoner families into which they married either are born with perfect teeth or have access to quality dental care including orthodontia****. 

Is there a shortage of orthodontists in Great Britain, or are there plenty of orthodontists there, and all of them starving because the general population does not give a hoot about having straight teeth? 

If a shortage of cosmetic dentists and orthodontists is determined to be the cause of the discrepancy, perhaps I should abandon the practice of medicine altogether in order to become an orthodontist somewhere in Great Britain, in which case I might soon become a billionaire. Then again, perhaps I should not. I would quite possibly starve because, rather than joining the world's ranks of billionaires,  I might not earn any money at all due to not being able to force myself to go to work because of the compelling nature of the television programming there.


*    Check out the Stormin' Mormon on Youtube if you get the chance.


**  My aunt dated a guy whose sister won The Gong Show by singing while doing bird calls, frog croaks, and other miscellaneous animal noises in the middle of her song. She was a talented and trained opera singer; the animal noises she just picked up on the sweet potato farm.  My aunt, the guy she dated, and another tuba player were supposed to appear on "The Gong Show" as a trio that played basketball and tuba at the same time (they used Nerf basketballs and threw them into the bells of each other's tubas), but one of the three of them was too hung over to travel on the assigned day, and the other two decided that the show didn't necessarily have to go on.


*** Seriously, I could barely tell what song she was trying to sing, and it's a song I and probably all of you know well.



****Kate and Pippa Middleton are not walking around with overbites or with gaps between their teeth. i know this because I checked it out in People and Us magazines, both of which are known to be erudite and authenticated academic works.

Trump or Kim Jong Idiot: Who Has Less Self-Control?

I don't often delve deeply into politics in this space. I have no qualms about discussing specific politicians I consider good-looking or at least mildly cute, and neither do I hesitate to mention it when I find a given politician distasteful, boring, or especially lacking in competence or intelligence. Regarding the broader issues, or even why individuals chose to vote for whom they did, however, I mostly leave it alone.  No one is going to change anyone else's mind either on social media or on a blog.  Few good things and all sorts of bad things come as a result of attempting to create posts of substance in regard to partisan politics. All of this notwithstanding, I shall go against  my personal policy at this time. My intent is not to offend anyone who will read this, and I hope I don't.

The 2016 election was the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote. The election was a disappointment to me.  Neither party offered what I could consider a viable candidate. The democratic candidate seemed to me to be ideologically close enough to me for me to vote in her favor, while I had and continue to have issues with her integrity. For most of us there will seldom if ever be a perfect match with a candidate, or at least with a candidate chosen by a major party. In a normal election, we all have the luxury, if we choose to exercise it, to vote for a candidate who has no actual chance of winning the election based on our convictions that the person is a superior candidate. 

In a closely contested election, however, the reality is that a vote cast for a minor candidate is, in reality, a vote in favor of whichever of the two major candidates one finds less suitable to hold the office. In a nail-biter as we had in 2016, either the democratic party's candidate or the republican candidate was going to win the election, which has been the norm for many years, but the 2016 presidential election was so tightly contested that your vote or mine might actually have mattered. It was probably the wisest course of action in 2016 to have looked closely at the candidates and to have decided, even if neither candidate was anyone's idea of a dream candidate, whether one of the two was especially distasteful, and to have cast a vote in favor of the other one. Once the major parties chose their candidates, at least in the 2016 election, either Clinton or Trump was going to be president. Even though, when presented with such a Hobson's choice, the temptation to vote for an obscure candidate or to write in the name of somebody's pet might have been overwhelming so that when whatever would inevitably go wrong ultimately did go wrong, one could quite honestly claim none of the blame, the wiser option was to examine the slate as presented by the major parties and to vote for the lesser of the evils. We were all going to have to live with one candidate or the other following the 2016 election; it was prudent for anyone eligible to vote to choose wisely.

The voting public spoke and, according to our present system of the Electoral College (which is no longer relevant in my opinion and is an inane way of selecting a president), Trump was elected to our nation's highest office. While I didn't like the outcome, I could accept that a portion of the voting public was every bit as disturbed by Clinton as I was by Trump.  It wasn't exactly easy for me to vote in favor of Clinton, either. The quandary in which the two major parties placed us created a difficult situation.

What I don't understand, however, is that many voters actively chose Trump as opposed to opting for what they considered to be the lesser of two evils. Everyone has a right to his or her opinion. Still, I cannot comprehend how any lucid person could believe such a  pompous, bombastic, unstable, venom-spouting reality TV icon would be even a fitting chief executive for our government of, by, and for the people, and worldwide representative of all that is American, much less a competent steward of the black box containing controls for our nuclear weapons.  From public opinion polls and news accounts, the man was the first choice of a portion of those among us capable of registering to vote and of filling out a ballot.  The people of whom I write didn't merely opt for Trump because voting for Clinton was an unconscionable prospect for them; they likely would have voted for him regardless of who opposed him. The very idea flies in the face of all reason.

Now we're seeing the results of the choice made by the unwashed masses of our society. Once again, I don't fault anyone who voted for Trump solely because he or she felt Clinton was unsuitable for the office of president. The two major parties put us all between the proverbial rock and hard place. I voted as I felt had to vote. You did the same. The collective fault belongs neither to you nor I.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are engaged in a pissing war, boasting of superiority and threatening each other with nuclear weapons, when neither will face close direct contact with said weaponry. Both of them will be holed up in the most protective bunkers their nations can devise if and when the nuclear warheads fly. 

Members of the military -- your cousins and mine, some as young as eighteen years of age -- will suffer the consequences of this battle Trump and Kim Jong Idiot are puffing out their chests and proposing to start.  While Trump is protected in the comfort of Cheyenne Mountain or some other fortress, young people on the front lines and otherwise in harm's way will lose their lives. Even civilians living in South Korea are in grave danger, as are those living in Guam, the Philippines, and a host of other locations. For all we know, we're not even safe here. There isn't room for all of us in Cheyenne Mountain, though Trump's extensive progeny likely has reservations there or in another similarly protected location. 

I'm not suggesting we should continue to allow North Korea to build their nuclear arsenal. I am saying that the preservation of the ego of our president isn't a sufficient reason for him to be allowed to make incendiary comments and tweets that may unnecessarily cause an erratic head of state with delusions of grandeur to unleash whatever nuclear warheads he has with the intent to to take out as many Americans and American allies as possible on his way to Hell*. Trump, work with your advisers, who are, I hope, a whole lot smarter than you are, to devise a well-conceived plan, and follow it. If that involves the use of heavy weapons, so be it. But don't start a war we're not quite ready to fight because you cannot control the words that come out of your mouth or travel from your fingers to your phone or computer keyboard.  Shut the fuck up, Donald Trump, before you get my cousins and their colleagues killed!

This is stupid, I admit, but I'm all for Trump and Kim Jong Un traveling to a remote location, taking with them the weapons of their choosing that will not harm anyone other than the two of them, and fighting it out in any way they choose as long as only they will be harmed by their actions. This is becoming a war between the two of them, anyway. Why not let them fight it out? Even Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had the decency to schedule a duel and to leave others out of their personal feud.

*Hell is a figurative term here. I'm not convinced of its actual existence as anything other than a state of mind.

The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes

Tuesday evening my left lateral  malleolus (the bony protuberance at the bottom of the fibula on the outside of the ankle) was fractured as a result of a blow from a hard and dense flying object. My left cuboid (a small bone in a cluster of bones just above the metatarsals) also endured an evulsion fracture, which would have happened when I fell to the floor following the initial impact of the flying object.  My anterior cruciate ligament was also partially torn. Mild displacement of the malleolus was present. I was initially given a soft cast and told by an orthopedic resident to see an orthopedist on Thursday, but the attending physician supervising me for my gastroenterology rotation called me very early Wednesday morning because the orthopedist and radiologist who had reviewed my x-rays recommended surgical setting of the bone (open reduction internal fixation, or ORIF, it's called, meaning that the bone is put into place, then a plate is attached, usually with screws or pins).  Concern about possible damage to dorsalis pedis artery dictated that surgery needed to happen sooner rather than later. My brother drove me to the hospital at 4:40 a.m. on Wednesday, and I was immediately prepped for surgery.

My surgery went exactly as planned, I was told. I somehow thought in my drug-induced haze that I had a boot over my injury, but the area has been enclosed in a cast to my mid-thigh -- higher than it would otherwise be  because of the injury to the ACL. The doctor really wants me ACL to heal without surgery, as do I. I will need to use crutches for six weeks. I'll be in the hospital until Friday. I may be allowed to return to work as early as Tuesday.

I'm not really hallucinating now, but neither am I feeling much pain. Negotiating for drugs has been a bit like participating on "Let's Make a Deal." Fentanyl seems to be the drug of choice these days, but I dislike it and fear it. I don't care for morphine, either. I'll deal with Demerol or Dilaudid if necessary, but's that's as far as I want to go with IV pain killers. My brother already filled my prescription for Vitamin V that one of the residents gave me Tuesday night, so I can use those if there isn't time to fill whatever the surgeon gives me when I'm discharged from this place.

My supervising attending physician has been very kind to me, especially considering that the accident wasn't in any way connected to him. I had already put in a full 50 hours for this week by the time I left the hospital on Tuesday night. I did so last week s well, which means that I'm ten hours ahead.  Still, he's taking the position that because the accident happened at work, I should not be penalized  for needing to be off work any more than I would be if I were a paid employee of the hospital and now on Worker's Comp. (From what I've heard about worker's Compensation, I'm very fortunate not to be dealing with the nightmarish red tape associated with it.) My uncle was injured on-the-job when he was a resident. He told me that if he were ever injured on-the-job again, he would drag himself home and would lie with his hand on a stack of Bibles if necessary in order to convince everyone concerned that the accident had not happened at work and was, therefore, not subject to Worker's Compensation regulations.

I was concerned about an earlier blog I had authored describing the accident, as I didn't want to suffer any wrath from my medical school's powers that be. He asked if he could see the blog. I brought up a draft of it that didn't identify my URL (I don't need additional scrutiny). He read it and said it was fine. It painted my former supervising resident in a somewhat negative light, but, he said, deservedly so, and was mostly a recitation of events with the minimal judgment  of only a few adjectives interjected on my part as commentary to the dialogue offered by the former supervising resident.  Since I have no intention of suing anyone, it's fair game, he said,  to share what was said in the heat of the moment. Since I'm not naming my medical school, my administrators don't have to fear being made to look bad by my recounting of the events.

I was set to begin my sub-internship in October. My preceptor was contacted, and she made the necessary contacts in order to delay my externship until November. With some specialties, it really wouldn't matter one way or another if I were in a cast, but with a pediatric surgery specialty, I will need the ability to be on my feet. I will have my neonatology clerkship following this one, and will then fulfill my sub-internship. In some ways it might be better to get a bit more experience with neonates before potentially assisting with their surgeries, anyway.

If I were a religious zealot, I might say the leg injury happened so that my schedule could be changed for the better. I'm not a religious zealot, though, and I don't believe that silly line about everything happening for a reason. The flying object hit my fibula because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period.

Perhaps I look a bit this way right now. IV opioids are potent.

Alexis in the Sky With Diamonds

what I may look like in twenty-four hours

I was the victim of a freak accident at the very end of my workday earlier this evening, and now I'm in extreme pain. I didn't bother to fill a prescription for pain meds because I didn't think they would be needed. Suffice it to say that I was wrong. Dead wrong.

My supervising resident and I were going over charts. My presence isn't really needed in order for him to go over the charts, as the guy does not allow me  to actually write anything in a patient's chart, but he has been unbelievably reluctant to allow me to leave before his workday has finished even though my workday has usually started roughly two hours before his began. He invents work for me so that he can justify making me stay. He asked me to read all of the charts before he made notations and to comment. He then made his notations and asked me to read them. In most cases he wrote down what I said verbatim. The activity was a complete waste of my time.

For some reason unbeknownst to me, the resident had his laptop in the physicians' computer pod.  Residents don't usually need their personal laptops, but his was there, plugged in and charging. As he was finishing up, he picked up his laptop, apparently forgetting that it was plugged in. The adapter part of the charger flew off the table on which it had been resting. It swung and hit my left lateral malleolus (the wide protuberance of the fibula where it reaches the ankle) very hard and probably, judging from the residual bruise, struck my ankle with one of its edges. It was a relatively flukish occurrence -- probably not even in the top five of flukish accidents involving me, but still a rather freak happening. I don't think the two of us could recreate the mishap with the same outcome if we attempted it a hundred times.

My immediate reaction to the rendezvous between my fibula and the resident's charger was to fall to the floor, clutching my ankle, and to let loose with a string of expletives. The resident was at first taken aback by my choice of words and by the volume at which I unleashed them, and lost no time in rebuking me for having risked offending someone. Then another resident standing nearby took a closer look at my ankle and said it appeared to be broken. "No fucking way!" the supervising resident blurted out at roughly twice the volume I used in my expletive rant. I can only assume that the degree of affront caused by the utterance of expletives is to be considered inversely proportional to the importance of the person from whose mouth they emerge.

My supervising resident knelt to look at my ankle.  "With ankles the size of yours, " he rationalized, "you really should keep them covered for your own protection. My charger could not have hit you that hard.  This was not my fault.
You have defective bones."

"Way to blame the victim, spaz," another resident contributed.

Someone sent a nurse for a wheelchair and someone else got ice. I was taken to radiology and wheeled in ahead of God knows how many people who were waiting. I suppose there should be some advantage to having been maimed by a senior resident. A technician quickly took the necessary shots of my leg. The films were ready almost immediately. The residents huddled around them. My supervising resident was incredulous at what he saw. "It had to have been broken before my charger hit her!" he insisted.

"Right," another resident responded. "Your charger just happened to hit her foot in exactly the place where the bone had previously been broken. She managed to work all day on a broken fibula without once complaining about it. You realize how stupid that sounds, don't you?"

The supervising resident then turned to me. "You know I didn't do this on purpose, I hope," he told me.

I laughed. "You couldn't have done it on purpose if you had tried," I answered.

The jerk actually argued that he could have purposely have done it if he had tried. I didn't even engage him. I looked away and let him talk to the wall. It's the same moron who insisted that there's no such thing as perfect pitch. He would argue with a cadaver if there were no live body present.

"I'm really sorry," he said for the first time.  

I accepted his apology. Someone went to show the X-ray to the orthopedic resident who was on the floor. I was moved from the X-ray room to an empty exam table. The orthopedic resident came in and poked and prodded, then felt my toes to ensure that the blood supply was getting through. He told someone to put a temporary cast on it and said I needed to be seen in two days. He said that someone needed to give me a prescription for hydrocodone. I said I wouldn't need it. He told me to fill it anyway. I didn't. 

He was right and I was wrong. I've been awake with my entire leg throbbing all night. I suspect that in addition to the fracture, I did some additional damage when I fell. Matthew has to be at work at 6:30. He will drop my prescription off then. I'll get someone to bring the goods here for me.

The resident told me not even to think about showing up tomorrow (which is now today). Someone drove me home in my car. I'm not sure how the person got back, but I don't him lurking outside, so I assume that someone must have picked him up. 

I've been watching youtube videos all night in a futile attempt to distract myself from the pain. I had forgotten how much fractures hurt. I still think I'd take a fracture over a perforated intestine as long as it's not a spine, skull, hip, or pelvis fracture, but it's far from a fun way to spend an evening. I don't plan to be in pain tomorrow night. By this time tomorrow I will probably have kaleidoscope eyes.

Make Love, Not War

The child pictured here is not my mom, as my mom doesn't allow pictures of her to be posted on my blog. it might just as well have been my mom. I'm told that she was one of the original flower children. She used to write "Make Love, Not War" and draw peace signs with chalk on the sidewalks outside her family's home when she was two. (She was precocious to the extent that she made me look like a late-bloomer by comparison.)  Her political expressions didn't go over terribly well, as her father was an air force pilot, and her family lived in base-owned housing at the time. 

The local Catholic school that educated her siblings allowed her to enroll in kindergarten a year early because their enrollment in kindergarten was low that year. Most of the year was uneventful for her, as she did her work quietly and didn't bother others. 

My aunt said there was a problem once because my mom wrote once "Free Love" on the top of her spelling test. The nun who taught her class insisted that when she got home, she must ask her mother what was the meaning of the term "Free Love," then come back and report it to the class the next day. Her mother told her that "Free Love" meant living with a person of the opposite sex when the two were not married. i'm not sure exactly what the nun/teacher hoped to accomplish by this, but by the end of the day, every kid in the class who could write was writing "Free Love" on his or her paper, and they all knew what it meant, or at least knew the G-rated definition of the term.. They apparently told their parents that Erin had taught it to them. 

Several of the parents called my grandmother to complain about her daughter providing sex education to their offspring. (My mom did not yet have a clue as to the mechanics of sex.) My grandma pretty much passed the buck and blamed the nun/teacher. She told the other parents her daughter had only written the slogan on her own paper, but that the nun had called attention to it and made a huge deal out of it, requiring that my mom recite the definition of "Free Love" in front of the class.

Still, my grandmother had better things to do than to field phone calls from irate parents of my mom's classmates, so she taught my mom a few other slogans to write. My mom learned "Flower Power," ''Groovy,' "Sock It To Me," 'Smile! God Loves You," "Have a Nice Day," "Right On," "Stamp Out Reality," "Sock It To Me," and others. One mother of a classmate eventually called to complain about my mom teaching her kid to say, "Look it up in your Funk & Wagnall." (The kid was too dumb to write that or anything else, including his own name.) My grandma was at an officers' wives' club meeting that night, and my grandfather had to take the call. He was dumbfounded, but eventually got a word in edgewise in order to tell the woman that "Funk and Wagnall" was a publisher of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference materials. The rather dim bulb thought the term was some sort of expletive. 

Children's vocabularies can be modified, but stupidity is often irreparable.

I don't own this video. I sincerely hope the rightful owner is not offended by my use of it. i added this video after posting because I found it after the fact, but it perfectly depicts the scene of which my mother would have loved to have been a part had she not been less than a year old during the summer of love. she would have enjoyed participating even as a child, but she was born to an air force officer. Alas, some things are not meant to be.

I don't own this video. I included it because it features my mom's favorite song from when she was little. I hope the owner does not object to my use of the video.

Tone Deafness Versus Tune Deafness

I mentioned in my most recent post that true tone deafness does not exist except where actual deafness exists. since then I've researched the concept a bit further. According to research, my statement was correct, but my rationale for it may have been somewhat flawed, or at least not in total accord with the current school of thought as espoused by the expert.

True tone deafness does not exist separately from actual deafness primarily because almost anyone, once taught the musical concepts of "higher' and "lower" in relation to pitch, basically anyone who can hear the pitches can determine the higher or lower of the two except possibly with intervals of only one-half step. Furthermore, few people need to be taught the concept of "higher" or 'lower" in pitch, and nearly all can differentiate between higher and lower even with one-half-step intervals. still, it would be unfair to classify a person as possessing the quality f tone deafness without first ascertaining a basic understanding of the underlying concepts.

I stated in my most recent blog that most people can hear when others sing or play an incorrect note. Such is apparently not always the case. I found a video of a young woman who plays the clarinet. She sometimes adds flats or misses sharps. She doesn't hear the melodic changes (usually not for the better) that are created in doing so.If you know the hymn she is playing, you will hear the A-flat concert (B-flat on clarinet) that should be A-natural concert (or B-natural on clarinet). I would like to have selected a more well-known hymn for non-LDS readers, but for some reason, the young woman who made this video favors they hymns in the LDS hymnal that are not in common with other denominations. C'est dommage!

                      I do not own this video. I hope that I have offended no one in borrowing it.

Perfect Pitch; What does it mean, and is it even real?

As I was reviewing patient charts on Thursday, a member of my cohort who had just finished his gastroenterology rotation came into the conference area where I was looking over records after the supervising resident physician made notations.  The resident looked up and briefly greeted him. My cohort-mate said to the resident, "So you're working with Alexis now."

It was a bit of a Captain Obvious moment, as there would have been no other logical reason for the two of us to have been simultaneously in the physician's computer pod and passing patient records to one another, but the resident let it go. "Yes," he responded to the preceding comment with no perceivable enthusiasm.

"Alexis is a musician," my colleague told my superior. "She has perfect pitch."

"There's no such thing as perfect pitch," the resident intoned.

"Really?" I queried, though not with any marked incredulity, as I've heard the line before.  

It's all a matter of semantics, though in this case it's also a matter of the resident physician's ignorance as to what is meant by perfect pitch. I don't typically  use the term perfect pitch because it's an imprecise and sometimes misunderstood term. 

I prefer the term absolute pitch over perfect pitch. Absolute pitch refers  to a person's ability to reproduce a given musical tone or to identify a given tone without external reference. A person who can spontaneously produce a given note within a quarter-tone of standard pitch is usually considered to possess the skill of absolute pitch. Likewise, anyone who consistently identifies notes without external reference also would be said to possess the trait. Regardless, the only arguable point in reference to absolute pitch is the criteria used in measuring or determining who is in possession of the skill.  The concept of absolute pitch exists. Some individuals possess the ability to identify pitches or to produce tones spontaneously.

Relative pitch refers to a person's ability to hear notes in relation to one another. This pertains both to the concept of identifying specific tones on a scale as well as to the premise of pitch in reference to a specific note.  When musical tone is produced by voice or by any instrument for which a tone is not fixed, the pitch may, obviously, be higher or lower in relation to any other tone. A person with a strong sense of relative pitch possesses the ability to match pitch vocally or mechanically with accuracy to a greater degree than does a person with a weaker sense of relative pitch. It could be argued that anyone who is not clinically deaf probably possesses some degree of relative pitch. Relative pitch is, as is absolute pitch, a very real concept, and its existence is not a point for debate.

Tone deafness is another pitch-related concept. In actuality the concept is something of a misnomer.  True tone deafness exists, for the most part, only where actual deafness exists.  If a person truly lacked the ability to hear and to differentiate between tones, the first seven notes of "Old McDonald" would sound identical to the first seven notes of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."  Almost anyone who knows both songs will hear the distinction between the two. What is
most commonly equated with tone deafness is the inability to sing on key or to match pitch. Yet people who cannot sing on key can usually tell if someone else is not singing on key. Singing is a complex skill -- both a motor skill and an auditory skill. Individuals who lack the ability to sing on key either cannot hear themselves as others hear them when they produce vocal tones, or they lack the motor ability to control their voices precisely, or both.  Some accomplished musicians cannot sing on key.* Others can eventually find a pitch with their voices but cannot hit a note cleanly at the outset. Other people can come close to maching a pitch, but cannot differentiate between the production of a tone that is mildly sharp or flat as opposed to producing the identical tone, or matching the pitch. Some people have more refined senses of relative pitch than do others. It doesn't mean that the others are tone deaf, though,  unless they're actually clinically deaf.

I suspect that any confusion over the reality of perfect pitch occurs  as a result of the occasional practice of referring to a person's highly refined sense of relative pitch as perfect pitch. 

One of the nurses with whom I worked in my dermatology rotation recently spoke to me of the violin studies of her ten-year-old son, Ian. The nurse's child was studying violin under the tutelage of the nurse's fiance. "My fiance doesn't believe in perfect pitch," the nurse told me, "but he says that Ian's pittch is pretty darn good."

Along those same lines, when I was a child, I read If You Could See What I Hear, which is the autobiography of blind singer Tom Sullivan (on which the subsequently produced and heavily panned movie of the same name was based.) Sullivan related the story of his being evaluated for placement in a choir by being asked to match the tones produced on a piano by the choir director. The  choir director told Sullivan, based on his vocal reproduction of the piano tones, that he had perfect pitch. 

I asked my mom, who was the only parent home at the time, how a person could possibly tell that another had perfect pitch simply by having the person hum or sing notes that were played on a piano. My understanding of perfect pitch had been that it equated with a sense of abolute pitch, and reproducing the notes one heard would be no evidence whatsoever of anyone's sense of absolute pitch. My mom explained the concept of relative pitch to me, and said that some people considered a refined sense of relative pitch to mean perfect pitch, but that it was a misuse of the term. She explained why, in musical academia, the terms absolute pitch and relative pitch were used instead of perfect pitch.

But what if we agreed,  for the sake of argument,  to equate perfect pitch with highly refined relative pitch? Would that, then, support the premise of my supervising attending physician (and of Ian's mother's fiance) and others that perfect pitch is a myth and an unattainable standard, and that no one actually possesses it -- that perfect is, like infinity, an unreachable quality or quantity? No; even equating perfect pitch with relative pitch would not create an unattainable standard, thereby negating the existence of the skill of perfect pitch. If pitch existed only in the ears of those who heard it,  and pitch couldn't be quantified or measured, perhaps the non-existence of the skill of perfect pitch could be supported.  Instruments exist, however,  to measure any pitch's vibrations in a given interval of time, thereby availing the option of standardizing pitch. Likewise, the capacity to measure or to document a person's perception of pitch exists as well.

Again, because pitch can be precisely measured, an individual's perception of pitch can likewise be measured. Hence, even if we used highly refined sense of relative pitch as our standard for perfect pitch, people exist whose senses of relative pitch allow them to differentiate between pitches with differences as minute as a single rotation per minute. Some people can actually hear the difference between four-hundred-forty rotations per minute and for-hundred-forty-one rotations per minute. People with such refined auditory perception are few and far between, but they do exist, which is proof positive that perfect pitch exists regardless of whether its definition is encompaased by the parameters of relative pitch or of absolute pitch. I assume that both my supervising resident physician and my nurse acquaintance's fiance are operating under the assumption that however refined a is person's capacity to distinguish  pitch, it could be better still. Maybe or maybe not, but if a person can auditorially differentiate between one-hundred-thirty-nine, one-hundred-forty, and one-hundred-forty-one vibrations per second,  both Ian's mother's fiance and my supervising resident physician are wrong no matter what is the agreed-upon definition of perfet pitch.

I really couldn't care less about what the resident physician thinks about perfect pitch or about any other aspect of music except that most people who waste time and energy arguing that  perfect pitch does not exist do so because they don't have it. They believe that because they don't possess it, perfect pitch is therefore not real, and no one else can have it, either. I do not need for my supervising intern to hate me just because I have a better sense of pitch than he does. 





*Composer Burt Bacharach was known for his ability to compose and to play the piano both by reading standard music notation and by ear, but couldn't sing on-key.



**The hertz (the symbol of which is Hz) is the standard unit of frequency for reference purposes, defined as one cycle per second.

Bullying, Teen Suicide, and Other Societal Plagues

My heart bleeds for anyone whose life has been significantly harmed by bullying of any kind. All of us have probably been bullied to some degree, but some of us have suffered far more than others have. I was lucky. While I had "brainy-and- physically-weak nerd" metaphorically scrawled all over me, I came of age in a smallish university town that might best be described as an intellectual enclave. The jocks, the snobbish girls, and even the thugs existed in my hometown, but they were outnumbered by studious types and didn't have the momentum or power that those same groups had in other places.

Bullying in general, and cyber-bullying in particular, have led to considerable heartache for many young people, and have led or contributed to dire consequences for some. Consensus as to where lies the rightful blame is difficult to establish. In the end, except perhaps in a court of law, blame  may not be all that important, anyway. For those whose lives have been lost to this horrendous plague, we can only mourn. For those whose youths were tarnished by the same, we can only hope that the empowerment of adulthood more than compensates for lost innocence in what should have been the proverbial wonder years. 

Society as a whole is working hard to educate young people regarding the dire consequences of cruelty to others. Parents, physicians and counselors, school personnel, child and adolescent advocates, and others strive to educate themselves and colleagues about both the overt and the less conspicuous signs that a young person may be suffering from the effects of bullying or may himself or herself be guilty of perpetrating acts of bullying against others. The latter group -- those guilty of perpetrating acts of bullying against others -- has been somewhat tougher to identify and address. Parents are, as a group, not especially reluctant to admit or to accept when their offspring are victims of force, threat, or coercion with the intent of abuse, intimidation, aggressive domination, or ostracism [paraphrase of author's definition of bullying]. Acts of wrongdoing don't occur in a vacuum, however; if one person's child is a victim of bullying, another person's child  (or --think Cain and Abel here-- another of that person's children) -- violated society's rules of fair play. While parents are to be applauded for recognizing and responding to the victimization of their children, they need to be equally vigilant in recognizing and responding to acts of perpetration by their offspring. 

Thirty-or-so years ago , young people were expected to handle their own social interactions. Adults presumed that children and youth possessed the abilities to work things out for themselves. If a particular young person seemed to be a frequent target or victim of any sort of persecution, adults assumed that the young person was doing something to invite such mistreatment, or, at the very least, was responding to it in such a way as to invite further mistreatment.  And while there might have been a shred of truth to the idea that victims were not often randomly selected, and usually there was a reason [I'm not suggesting it was necessarily ever a good reason, but often there was a reason] as to why a given kid was singled out for bullying, those reasons, under the microsope of more than a generation's worth of analysis, do not hold up as anything resembling justification for the torture suffered by countless youth. 

We, as a society, have evolved, and are no longer, in most cases, leaving known victims of bullying to fend for themselves. While  the approaches may vary greatly in effectiveness, most schools have, at the very least, anti-bullying policies in effect. Children are encouraged to speak up or to alert adults if they or anyone else are being victimized by bullies. Most parents, one would hope, feel sufficiently empowered to speak to school authorities if their children are victimized by acts of bullying. Children are told to inform adults if it is happening to them. Teachers are told to inform their superiors of acts of bullying. Those charged with supervising groups of young people are educated as to how to identify less conspicuous manifestations of bullying that might have gone undetected in previous eras. All of these measures are necessary and are the very least we as a responsible society must do to safeguard our young people. But are these measures enough?

Beginning earlier but peaking in the 1940's and 1950's, the disease of poliomyelitis, known alternately as infantile paralysis and simply polio, reached epidemic proportions, killing or paralyzing hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year.  Those who were not afflicted lived in fear of the dreaded disease. Clearly something had to be done.

What was actually done to fight polio?  Medical science has yet to discover an actual cure. Treatment is still aimed at symptom relief. Polio is caused by a virus, but we lack a specific retroviral drug to combat the disease. Experts discovered that the disease is transmitted through fecal-oral contamination, through oral-oral contamination, or through nasal-oral or nasal-nasal contamination.  It was certainly efficacious for the medical authorities to know how poliomyelitis was transmitted, but that knowledge alone wasn't sufficiently effective in thwarting polio. Yet we don't have a great deal of polio around today. What accounted for the disease becoming essentially a non-issue at least in developed nations?

As treatment and transmission were addressed by others, Jonas Salk and Alber Sabin were hard at work to develop vaccines, which would protect those who took the vaccines against the disease. Salk's injectable version of the vaccine became available in 1955. Sabin's oral version debuted in 1961. Variations of the vaccines are still in use today and are the reason a disease that once claimed hundreds of thousands of victims each year had only thirty-six reported cases in 2016. * 

How, then,  can the principle of inocculation against poliomyelitis be applied to the concept of bullying? Wouldn't it be nice if every child could be given an injection or a vial of oral medication that would prevent them from ever being tormented by bullies? While the disease of polio would seem to be every bit as complex as is the plague of bullying, the solution is obviously not quite so simple as giving a child a dose of medication at a few carefully spaced intervals in his or her infancy and childhood and expecting it to effectively combat the problem . . . or is it? A vaccine to combat the effects of bullying that can be administered orally or by injection does not exist, at least within the current constraints of medical science. The prevention of bullying cannot presently, if ever, be carried out with the distribution of mass-marketed containers of inactivated or weakened strains of the bullying virus. Is there, however, a way that we can metaphorically inactivate the potentially ravaging effects of bullying in our young people? Would it hurt to try? Can we afford not to try?

It would make sense to start with what we know presently about the very most damaging effects of bullying. What's the very worst thing that can ever happen as a result of bullying? We could probably agree that it would be loss of life: either a victim of bullying takes his or her own life, or he or she commits an act of violence against others after having been victimized to the point of not knowing what else to do. What caused the bully to reach such a state of desperation? Was it repeated text messages telling the victim that he was no longer welcome on this planet? Was it months or years of social media harassment? Or was it face-to-face acts of force, threats, or, coercion? Identifying a pathogen, whether physical or symbolic, would seem to be the first step in devising a future preventive measure against it.

Those charged with caring for, educating, and socializing today's young people are, for the most part **  doing their best to deal with bullying as it occurs.   We recognize that it is a very real concern. We're not looking the other way whenever it happens.  While there is room for improvement in our response to bullying, for the most part we're confronting it as we see it. We're also trying to teach our children not to be bullies. 

But what can we do for children that will cause the words of bullies to have less impact on them? How can we tell children, years before they ever hear the ugly words of bullies, that the bullies they will oneday hear will be liars? That, despite what any bully will one day tell them, they will not be stupid, skanky, or worthless?  How can we firmly plant in our children's minds that, no matter what any future bully says to the contrary, the world will not be a better place without them?***

I shall carry the polio analogy a bit further at this time. My implications here are radical, I acknowledge. Still,  if we wage a war against bullying through mass education yet ignore another key element in the very most devastating of potential effects of cyber-bullying, what we have done is akin to vaccinating our children against polio, yet knowingly allowing polio-contaminated fecal matter into the very areas in which we prepare and store the food that our children will eat. The very best of vaccines are still only ninety per cent or so effective. Would you trust your child's polio vaccine so much that you would allow polio- contaminated feces to be brought into your kitchen?

While a child or teen, in order to remain safe, may possibly need a cell phone in his or her possession when he or she is out in the world so that parents may contact the child at any time or vice versa, or so that the child may summon help as needed, the child does not have that same need when he or she is with parents in the home. If another kid really needs to reach your child, perhaps the kid could do so by telephoning via the family line. Likewise, perhaps we need to re-think the concept of each child using his or her laptop in the privacy of his or her room.  Perhaps all computers should be used in common areas, and perhaps they should be either locked away or password-protected to disable use when parents are not present.

It is naive even to imagine that we could ever go back to the way things used to be, with a single family computer and one phone line. On the other hand, we know that, in part anyway, suicides have happened when bullying found its way into the victims' homes through technology. It's a question each parent must ask and answer for himself, but if you asked the parent of any child who was driven to kill himself as a result of cyber-bullying if he or she would, if do-overs were possible, eliminate social media and texting from the home, what do you think the answer would be? 

Furthermore, does any minor child really need Facebook or any parallel social medium?

I'm a mere twenty-two years old. I hold a few lousy bachelor's degrees but am still almost a year away even from having completed my formal education. My real-life experience is practically nonexistent.  I've never had even a truly significant romatic relationship, much less a child. At this point, someone with far greater knowledge, wisdom,  experience, and expertise needs to confiscate my platform. I haven't a clue as to how to implement the suggestions I've offered, but someone out there does. The problem will probably never be eliminated entirely, but we're going to continue to lose our children and youth at an alarming rate until this issue is adequately addressed.


* vaccines are, at best, only ninety per cent [or so] effective. If parents become either stupid or selfish or both in regard to having their children vaccinated against polio, we could easily face another epidemic.

** Some are obviously doing a better job than are others.

*** "Just say no to drugs" had limited success, but maybe "Just say no to bullying" will be more successful.

Only YOU Can Prevent Cyber-Bullying!

I am, as is everyone I know, opposed to bullying in every form. Cyber-bullying, which seems at the present to be the prevalent form of bullying, is ugly and invasive, yet is also difficult to define. Sadly, many parents consider bullying as something other people's children do  Few parents seem equate the actions of their own offspring with cyber-bullying, or seem willing to consider that their own children are capable an act of such anti-social  proportions. Cyber-bullying is what happens to one's child as opposed to what one's child perpetrates against another kid.

Moreover, the term bullying is an imperfect and imprecise term, existing sometimes primarily in the eye of the beholder. When does a text message or interaction on social media cross the line between free speech and cyber-bullying?  Kids insult one another. My parents and their peers did it, my acquaintances and I did as well, as do today's kids.  Today's youth are more seriously harmed by the insults that occur via texting or social media because it is so difficult to escape. They're also more severely harmed by it, in my opinion, because they've been raised as precious and protected entities (snowflakes) who are unable to withstand any negative feedback whatsoever. I'm not suggesting that it's in any way acceptable for groups of youth to torment a single youth and to attempt to persuade the youth to end his or her life. Such is so clearly over the line that there's no real defense for it.  

But what about the insults that aren't particularly threatening and are not suggesting that the recipient remove himself or herslef from the planet?  I have, as has almost everyone, been on the receiving end of insults on occasion. When I was in seventh-grade, in a classroom political debate that, through very poor supervision on the part of an incompetent teacher, quickly degraded into an exchange of barbs, I was first called "Anorexis" by a rather clever classmate. (I've always been naturally thin.) The name quickly caught on. I maintained my composure throughout the day as the moniker gained momentum, but went crying to my mother's office immediately following school. My mom wisely did not plant herself in the principal's office of my school the following day.  While she was appropriately sympathetic with my plight, she told me that how much and how brutally I would be tormented with the insult was almost entirely contingent upon my reaction to it. She said that i needed either to laugh it off, to act bored by it, or, if a person persisted in insulting me, to retaliate in kind, but that it would serve me well to hide any anger or hurt feelings when doing so. She told me that, in the unlikely event that I was ever in trouble for responding to an oral insult with one of my own invention, as long as I wasn't profane or didn't capitalize on anyone's legitimate disability, she and my father would stand by me. My not-particularly-kind peers soon learned the hard way that they couldn't win a war of insults with me.  I'm not proud of having made other kids cry, but sometimes hurtful words can be effectively countered only with other hurtful words.

I didn't have texting capacity on my cell phone during most of my school days. Rare if not unheard-of is the middle-class teen in today's world who does not have access to text-capable phones and social media. Parents are quick to allow access to such media, but then are quick to complain when their offspring face victimization through channels they, the parents, allowed.  In particular, parents are quick to blame school personnel for cyber-bullying. In almost no cases are school personnel legitimately at fault for cyber-bullying.  Even if it doesn't happen during non-school times (which it usually does), it happens almost exclusively with the use of technological devices provided to young people by parents, not by the school system. Do parents think it is fair if their own offspring are disciplined by school administrators monitoring social media or text message exchanges happening during non-school hours? The answer is almost universally no. Why, then would parents expect the school to discipline someone else's kid for the same thing? The school lacks jurisdiction in most instances of cyber-bullying.

I shall share a slightly convoluted story involving one of my relatives and improper use of technology. My mom has been a school psychologist and school administrator. When almost any person in my extended family has an issue with anything happening at their children's  school, the person typically phones my mom for advice. In a recent happening, my cousin, who is a teacher of advanced mathematics in a high school, answered her door to find her district superintendent [and boss] on her doorstep. The superintendent presented my cousin with a display of obscene and threatening text mesages on his own daughter's cell phone , which came from my cousin's son's cell phone number. The girl had recently broken off a relationship with my cousin's son. When he was confronted, my cousin's son said that his cell phone had been stolen. My cousin believed him, but her husband, the boy's father, didn't. He searched the kid's room and found the cell phone. My cousin's kid then said it must have been one of his friends who stole the phone and left the messages, and the friend must then have hidden the phone in my cousin's kid's room. 

My cousin believed her son. My mom told her that was ridiculous. My mom also asked my cousin if her kid had ever lost his phone previously. My cousin answered affirmatively. My mom asked how she learned that her son had lost his phone the previous time. My cousin answered that her son immediately asked for a new phone. My mom asked her why the son didn't ask for a new phone this time. My cousin still tried to make excuses, but my mom told her she was ignoring logic as well as enabling her kid un unlawful and unacceptable behavior. 

My point here isn't that my cousin is stupid, though she behaved stupidly in the particular instance. The point is that a normally intelligent person [my cousin] was willing to believe improbable and absurd lies her kid told,  which made no sense at all, because parents often don't want to believe that their own offspring are capable of anti-social behavior. If cyber-bullying is as rampant as it is said to be, however, someone has to be guilty of committing the actual bullying. The parents of the world need to acknowledge that their kids are capable of being the victims as well as the perpetrators.

Parents need to monitor their kids' online and cell-phone activity.  When I was in high school, my brother and I didn't own our own computers and had to use those belonging to our parents when we needed online access. Both my parents' computers were equipped with programs that tracked every keystroke typed on their computers, every bit of pasted text, and every website visited. They checked their computers at least every other day. My brother had a phone with text capacity, but every text he sent or received went also to a program on my mom's computer. We weren't allowed to use Facebook.  Had my brother or I been on either the giving or receiving end of text-cyber-bullying, my parents would likely have known.  Too many of today's parents are not similarly vigilant.

Parents are the only ones who have any real power to stop cyber-bullying. Those parents who lack the technological skill to employ the tools necessary to monitor their offspring should either acquire those skills or should limit the access of their own offspring to tools they, the parents, fully understand, or, at the very least, should impose limitations once their offspring have abused cyber-privileges in any way. Access to technology for youth should be viewed as a privilege and not as an absolute right.

Reality TV from the White House

One of the CNN pundits referred to the staffing of the West Wing positions of the White House as Survivor:White House.  The comment wasn't far from actuality. What's happening at 1600 Pennsylvanie Avenue has sunk to the levels of reality TV programming.  To me, the premise seems less like Survivor than an old ABC reality series The Family, the premise of which was that, unbeknownst to the family members competing for a lucrative prize, the servants on staff in the mansion were charged with determining those voted off as well as the eventual winner. It's not that anything so noble as having the domestic staff vote contestants out of a competition based on rude, condescending, and otherwise inappropriate behavior is what is happening in today's White House. The likeness is more in that those who are being kicked off White House payroll don't necessarily know in advance who has the authority to exclude them. 

All of this would be entertaining were it not that the business of these people is supposed to be to run our nation rather than to entertain anyone.  I understand why North Korea is working around the clock to perfect their long-range missiles. This would seem the perfect time for any of our enemies to strike.  The staff members of the executive branch of our govermnet are likely far too preoccupied with protecting their own interests and preserving their own jobs to have the capacity to adequately advise the president. 

And as to the president himself, I don't even know where to begin. Perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise that a man who hosted a reality show in which his signature line was "You're fired!" would turn the human resources department of the White House into a revolving door.

The only person in the White House for whom I have anything resembling respect is Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  She has almost certainly sold her soul to the devil in a metaphorical sense by accepting any position whatsoever in the Trump campaign or administration, and she's going to find herself in the position of having to speak untruths even if unwittingly. Still, she seems to be a decent human being and a person of substance.

As far as Scaramucci is concerned, good riddance. 

Disclosure, Ethics, and Other Difficulties Plaguing the Trump White House

“There are so many qualified men and women who wanted to serve this president, this administration and their country who have been completely demoralized and completely, I think, disinclined to do so, based on the paperwork that we have to put forward, divesting assets, the different hoops you have to run through,” Conway said. “This White House is transparent and accountable, and we’ve all complied with those rules, but it has disincentivized good men and women. I hope it doesn’t disincentivize Anthony.”  -Kellyanne Conway, july 27, 2017 [italics added]

dis·in·cen·tiv·ize

disinˈsen(t)ivīz/

verb

discourage (a person or course of action) by removing an incentive.

In what way does requiring disclosure remove an incentive? Requiring disclosure might very well dissuade or discourage a person who had something to hide from doing that for which the disclosure was a requirement, but how does it remove an incentive? Does Kellyanne conway think that randomly tossing five-syllable words into a conversation increases her credibility?

Malapropism notwithstanding, is Kellyanne Conway's point that a requirement to conduct one's affairs in an ethical manner discourages potential public servants from filling government positions? If so, I would view that as being clearly a positive effect of the requirement of public disclosure.

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway debated CNN anchor Brian Stelter regarding the truth, lies, and scandals as conveyed by Donald J. Trump.

STELTER: "The scandals are about the President's lies. About voter fraud, about wiretapping, his repeated lies about those issues. That's the scandal."

CONWAY: "[Donald Trump] doesn't think he's lying about those issues, and you know it."

That's her best defense of Trump? Seriously?

Fidget spinners may be dangerous! *

* for  idiots

The most recent toy craze  of which I'm aware is that of the fidget spinners that seem to be everywhere. Every child over the age of five that I've seen in a medical practice in the past two months has toted at least one of the small devices in his or her possession. The spinners are apparently made by multiple manufacturers. I don't know if someone's patent attempt failed or if no one bothered to patent the design in the first place. Because the devices are made and sold by multiple outlets, there doesn't seem to be any consensus as to what should be the minimum age for using the devices independently, and there seems to be a bit of a quality control issue where some of the manufacturing jobs are concerned.

A young girl's mother has charged that the spinning fidgets are unsafe because her ten-year-old daughter put one in her mouth to clean it, it came apart, and one of the device's weighted bearings became lodged in the girl's throat. The girl underwent an endoscopy procedure to have the small part, which was approximately the size of a quarter, removed from her esophagus.  Yes, you read correctly that the child was ten years old. Yes you read correctly that the girl put the device in her mouth to clean it. You also read correctly that the girl's mother is blaming the manufacturer of the toy for the girl having inadvertently ingested the bearing piece from the toy.

When I was two years old, I was being driven back to my grandparents' home from  a birthday party in Utah by my Aunt Claudine.  I had in my hands a small cellophane bag that contained the party favor, which was a set of jacks. My aunt Claudine looked in her rear view mirror just in time to see me putting one of the jacks into my mouth. (That was unusual behavior for me. I typically had to be bribed even to put food in my mouth.) "Alexis, take that out of your mouth RIGHT NOW!" my aunt hollered at me. "It'll slip down your throat, and they'll have to cut you open to get it out. They might not even have time to knock you out first!" It was certainly a scare tactic, and perhaps overkill where a two-year-old was concerned, but it worked. It's the end result that matters where child safety is concerned. But wait, it gets better. "And besides," my aunt continued, "a [insert whatever derogatory name for any person of any different race that you would like to use; I'm not using the word my aunt used] might have touched that before it got put in the package." I was unsure of why it mattered that a person of that particular race had touched the jack, but the idea of anyone having touched the item was enough to make me think it shouldn't have been in my mouth. Your mouth is where you put things that are already clean, not a place you put things in order to get them clean. I would have expected a ten-year-old to know that.

An eleven-year-old boy in Australia threw his fidget spinner in the air. It came down and hit him in the eye, nearly causing a serious injury. His mother blames the toy,or more precisely, the toy manufacturer, for not posting some sort of warning that the toy can be dangerous because if a person tosses the spinner up into the air, it [DUH!] comes down.  Most of us have at least a basic understanding of  the practical applications of gravity and that an object tossed into the air will eventually make its way back down. I would say that perhaps sir Isaac Newton's work is not so esteemed in Australia as it is here in the U.S., but: A) I highly doubt that such is the case, and B) it's actually something of a relief to have someone who says or does something really stupid not to be an American for once. We generally have the stupidest people on the planet here; it's nice for Australia to take that particular monkey off our backs if only for this one time.

People who do not have children are often self-proclaimed experts concerning what children should or should not do. We often are incredibly quick to assert what our own future children will or will not do, and what we will do about it if they do those things that we say they will never do. I've seen many of my former fellow future parents go on to become actual parents and to eat their own words in more ways that I had previously imagined were possible.  For that reason, I'm ever so slightly reluctant to say that my future child will not, at the age of ten or at any other age, put a toy in her mouth (to clean it, no less) and accidentally ingest a part of the toy in the process. My child might also unsheathe a blade of a Swiss army knife, toss it in the air, and injure himself or herself or anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when what went up ultimately came back down. While I would love to believe that I am incapable of producing a child who is stupid enough to have done what either of the two children discussed previously here have done, we know that there are absolutely no guarantees when it comes to reproduction.  (I witnessed this first-hand when my father [who has maxed out every IQ test he has ever been given]  sired my brother [who wouldn't max out an IQ test if someone handed him the answer key right in the middle of the test. If anything, handing my brother the answer key would confuse him and cause him to score even more poorly than the dismally low score he would have gotten on his own].) My child might very well someday do something every bit as stupid as what either of those children did. Kids are inherently stupid. 

What I will say is that I will not be as stupid as are the parents of either child. If I become a parent and if, or more likely when, my child does something incredibly stupid, I vow to be grateful if luck has worked in my favor and the child and anyone near him escaped the act of stupidity with no permanent damage, and to allow my child to own the age-appropriate stupidity (if, for example, it's an eighteen-month-old child playing with a sharp or choke-able object, the stupidity is on me and not on the child) of his or her foolish act. It's only when we're allowed to own our behaviors that we can learn from them. The best way to ensure a state of perpetual and permanent stupidity for one's offspring is to blame someone else for their foolish behaviors.  

If I change my tune and join the side of the enablers if or when I someday become a parent, I invite anyone who knows me to call me on it. I will deserve it.