The Oregon Trail Game

By: | March 17, 2016

Oregon Ouroboros small LWONThe first time I played the Oregon Trail computer game – a parody of American westward expansion inflicted on countless school kids – was this winter. I was snug in bed, as befits a prospective pioneer facing one of history’s largest human migrations. Up to 500,000 settlers set out along the Oregon and California Trails in the mid-19th century. For my own treacherous 2,000-mile trip, I chose to be a banker from Boston, because I had just seen The Big Short and longed to inflict virtual revenge on the financial sector. I named this banker Beverly, since the game gave me no option to be a woman. Beverly’s sundry family members would be Pot Roast, Potato, Death, and – improbably in this bunch at least – Steven.

Predictably, Death was first to die. She drowned along with two oxen not long after we embarked from Missouri, when I tried to ford a river instead of paying the toll for a ferry. Steven, meanwhile, was plagued by misfortunes that will be familiar to all who’ve played this game. First he was exhausted, then broken-armed, then grappling with dysentery, then lost, then down with cholera. I finally ended his misery by crashing the raft bearing our covered wagon into a rock on the Columbia River, drowning us both near the end of the line in Oregon.

The game is a culty 1970s simplification of a complex historical event that contributed to the violent displacement of indigenous people and laid the foundations for today’s urban Northwest. But Americans have been preoccupied with valorizing and simulating the pioneer experience almost since the United States began colonizing the West Coast. Continue reading →

Contagious Compassion

By: | March 16, 2016

2015_0312_18471000On February 29, after having lunch in Hood River, Oregon, Kozen Sampson drove to a quiet neighborhood to take his dogs for a walk. He was getting out of his car, he says, when a man with brown hair approached and kicked his car door. The door smacked Sampson in the ear, knocking his head against the door frame.

Then Sampson, stunned and bleeding, heard his assailant say: “F—ing Muslim!”

Sampson has been a Buddhist monk for many years, and he was wearing his customary plain brown robes. He’s the founder of the Mount Adams Zen Buddhist Temple in Trout Lake, Washington—about 30 miles from Hood River, and not far from where I live in Washington state—and after his attacker ran off, he managed to stop the bleeding and drive home to the temple.

Sampson initially decided not to report the incident, but a friend convinced him that it needed to be made public, so on March 2, he called the Hood River police. (The police have not yet identified any suspects.) Later that week, Sampson told the Hood River News:

I am happy it happened to me and not to a Muslim. My biggest concern is for how anyone has to live with the fear and the distrust and the possibility of an assault.

I am happy it happened to me and not to a Muslim. I’d like to think that’s how I’d react to a whack on the head from a bigot, but I’m not sure I have it in me. Continue reading →

Redux: Is passion for science a heritable trait?

By: | March 15, 2016

This post first ran on August 24, 2011. My dad and I share an obsession with endurance sports. We don’t just love to get outside and ride our bikes, we actually feel antsy and anxious if we go too many days without working up a sweat. As I’ve written elsewhere, our compulsion for exercise has a genetic basis. Dad and I probably have an exercise inclination gene (or genes) that my mom and sister —who think we’re crazy— don’t.

On a recent visit to my parents, I wondered if a passion for science might also have some inherent basis. The thought occurred to me as Dad showed me some old photos. In one of them his parents, Mennonite wheat farmers who never went to college, are standing with Dad at his graduation from Taylor University. How did a farm kid from Kansas who grew up without ever knowing a single scientist end up with a master’s degree in physics, I wondered. Continue reading →

Kill the Sprickets, Kill Them All

By: | March 14, 2016

304068392_f7cc464f13_bHELEN: I like bugs. I started a Ph.D. in ants (and quit, but still think ants are awesome). I have blogged in this space about butterflies. I think the coming of the 17-year-cicadas is one of the most exciting things that happens in the world. My record is quite clear on this: me and bugs, we have no dispute. But I make an exception for camel crickets. They are horrible. Just horrible.

ANN:  They’re horrible.  They’re poop-brown, have way too many legs, and they jump exactly whatever height you are.  They jump on your body, you make involuntary noises.  They were in my basement, hordes of them.  I used to love finding them dead in the bucket of plant fertilizer or drowned in the basement toilet.  Wikipedia says they live in damp, dark places and in Japan they’re called toilet crickets.  In Baltimore, we call them sprickets.  Do they call them that in DC too?  

HELEN:  I haven’t heard them called sprickets down here in DC, but it’s possible that I just haven’t had enough conversations about them. Which is why I’m so glad we’re doing this.

CASSIE: I never saw a spricket or heard of a spricket until I moved to Baltimore. I rented this awesome apartment on St. Paul Street. The first time I went into the basement to do laundry, there they were. I hated them immediately, but it was months before I realized that they are a real thing with a name that exists places other than my basement. A real species.

It’s their stupid leaping that gets to me. Footsteps make them explode into the air like leggy popcorn kernels in a too-hot pan. But often as not, they would crash into me, not leap away from me. WTF, evolution. Go home. You’re drunk. This might not sound like such a grievous offense, but try walking into a dimly lit cement room where insects are ricocheting off every surface, including your body. It’s the stuff of goddamn nightmares. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 12, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-10 at 10.49.49 AM

What a week! Is there a theme? Sort of. Something about things that have power over our behavior. Some are real, some are tricks of a sort. Some are Andy Kaufman (again).

Guest poster Ann Garvin tells us that we are doomed to eat all the M&Ms because they come in so many pretty colors (the point being, manufacturers know how to affect our behavior when it comes to nutrition).

Erik looks at the fascinating history of homeopathy and the famous rebels who made it a thing. His piece is Part One in a “series” of two.

Sally, in Part Two, grabs the homeopathy baton and runs with it to the UK where she’s sure that the government’s support of this non-medical medicine is a sneaky and grand test of the good-old placebo effect.

Jenny (that’s me) says goodbye to winter by considering fire: Why is its raw power so intriguing to some but mundane to others?

And Erik started out the week with more political ranting…let’s just say Donald Trump, Andy Kaufman, and Berkeley Breathed walk into a bar. Don’t miss this one.

 

 

The Placebo President

By: | March 11, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-10 at 10.41.41 AMAs I have occasionally mentioned on this blog, I am currently working on a book on the many ways that our own brains can deceive ourselves. Placebos, hucksters, healers, hypnotists, and con men – it’s all in there.

It’s a fascinating subject and one that constantly reminds me to be careful about what I think I know. Our brains are wired to be accept what we see based on the things we expect to see. And sometimes, like with the gorilla in the basketball game, the most obvious thing can slip past our eyes just because it’s not what we were expecting.

Such as the fact that Donald Trump is actually a brilliant 1970s-era comic in disguise.

Continue reading →

Crackle, Hiss, Pop

By: | March 10, 2016

IMG_6103March showed up last week, on little cat feet rather than lion paws. A gentle snow jacketed the crocuses before watering their roots. The least patient daffodils opened, heads dipped against any last-ditch icy gusts. Spring’s legs are wobbly, but she’ll find her stride soon enough.

Still, at my little cabin in the Virginia woods, the nights remain cold. So we keep working our way through the woodpile, building the season’s last fires. We stack a trio of big, dry logs in the fireplace before bed, so the heat rises and swirls around us as we sleep. In the wee hours the fire slows to a simmer, and when we get up we stir the hot embers and feed them fresh wood, and ourselves fresh coffee, enjoying warmth through to our aging bones for one more day.

This my favorite turning point of seasons, the transition from hunching by the stove to cracking winter’s glue where windows meet their wells. Opening to those first warmish breezes and hearing the crosstalk of so many birds is a happy, cleansing ritual for me. And nothing feels better than the morning sun on a winter-weary face.

But spring’s stirring means my parting with other favorite ritual: watching fire burn. Continue reading →

Homeopathy Part One: Rebels of Medicine

By: | March 8, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 10.00.23 PMToday’s post is the first of a two-part series on homeopathy. Look for another tomorrow by LWON’s own Sally Adee. 

In 460 BCE, a rebel was born. Ruggedly handsome, fluffy hair that drove younger girls crazy and a gleaming bald pate that made the older ones swoon.

His buddies called him “The Father of Medicine,” “Ἱπποκράτης” or just “The Hippo.” His enemies called him that “that bald guy who gets angry whenever I beat my patients with a flaming branch to appease the god Hephaestus.”

He was Hippocrates of Kos and he rocked the Western world like almost no other human being in history.

Twenty-two centuries later, another rebel was born just a short 1,000 miles to the north. Samuel Hahnemann was equally popular with the ladies (or lady – he had eleven children) and had similarly luxurious hair on some of his head.

What did these two rebels have in common? It turns out quite a bit.

Continue reading →