Hand update

After another visit to the hospital including a 15-minute IV injection of antibiotics, my right hand is now more or less normal aside from the scratches you can see here. With only my left index finger still held up (until at least Saturday) typing speed is almost back to normal, and I have an extra long post just about ready to put up to prove it.

It's quite nice to have the benefit of medicine to give one the courage to pick up a cat with pneumonia to try to help it, even if the attempt fails. At worst (in Korea at least) this means one is out about $400, and after a few trips to the hospital and a few days of annoyance one is back to full health again. Without the convenience of a tetanus shot within the first eight hours though and who knows...I actually remember one of the few times as a child being scared by my teacher, one that decided to tell us about what happens to a person with lockjaw as their symptoms progress. Can't remember why he decided to tell us about that (I think it was grade 4) but he went into a fair bit of detail, about first not recognizing your family anymore, always being thirsty, then one's jaw locks up, back arches and that's the end, according to what he told us that day.

Although now that I think about it, maybe he told us that on the day we got vaccinations against it. All I can remember is him telling us about the disease but certainly there was a reason for it. Perhaps he put too much emphasis on the scariness of the disease and not enough on the "so now that you're getting vaccinated, you don't need to worry about it!" part.

This also reminds me of this video from Steven Pinker, on the myth of violence. That is, that the world is currently at the most peaceful state it has ever been, in spite of the fact that we have the capability to wreak more destruction than we ever have before. He mentions in the video some of the violent sport humans used to enjoy, including burning cats. And while it is true that we certainly have progressed in that area, one must also keep in mind that without an effective means of protection against disease and hunger (i.e. animals can steal the food you worked hard to produce and no food could easily mean death), it's no wonder that human-animal relations were not at their highest back then.



Edit: one day after mentioning yesterday that my girlfriend now has a blog (every post with pictures of our cats), we see the effect of the Page F30 Bump. Page views are off the charts! is somewhat inaccurate (since you always end up redoing the chart anyway) but sounds better than page views have substantially readjusted the chart's upper limit!