Ten Things

[akirlu]

Ah, the neener-neener game is going around again. I suppose I should go back and check my last list, to avoid duplication, but what-the-hell.

Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't:

1. Ridden a Fjord pony in Norway.
2. Been paid to chocolate-coat a manhole cover.
3. Taken a calculus midterm with an earthquake in the middle.
4. Projected Bride of the Monster for Tim Burton. Four times.
5. Owned a piece of the original Deathstar.
6. Won money from a millionaire at poker.
7. Googled my first and last name in quotes and not found anyone else but me.
8. Got coached by an Olympic gold medalist.
9. Toured Harlan Ellison's house for a TV segment.
10. Worked for a Nobel Laureate-to-be.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Those are damn interesting! I doubt very much there's something I've done that my friends probably haven't.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I feel certain that you have done things that your friends probably haven't. In the same way that several items on my list sound more, or less, interesting, depending on how you phrase it. Most of it was pretty much just business as usual at the time that it happened...

I for instance, have never snorted cocaine with any member of the Grateful Dead. And I'm starting to suspect that if you google your name in quotes, you're the only one who comes up, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am the only Marissa Lingen, and I've googled to demonstrate.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

I may be able to match your 6...I was playing Hold 'Em at the El Cortez one time and the owner, Jackie Gaughan, came down to play at our table with a big rack of chips. He lost quite lavishly.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

Also, I looked myself up on Wikipedia and found out I've been dead for ten years.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I think I'm the only person who turns up when I google my name in quotes. On the other hand - purely by happenstance - I once found my name on a tombstone when I wasn't expecting it.

Closest to no. 10: took a small lecture class from a Nobel science laureate that already was. Didn't even know he was a laureate until halfway through the term.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And do you believe that the rule should be considered in sets which you call moral codes?

(Whatever that means. I've noticed that about Wikipedia: if you don't already know something about the subject, the articles are often incomprehensible.)

[joyful-storm.livejournal.com]

I don't even find ME when I google my name in quotes.

(Maiden name does get hits, but all me, so long as we aren't using the most boring possible option, which I usually didn't. In retrospect that seems good, because it looks like a pr0n actress has been wearing it out.)

What a seriously cool life you've had!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Let's see...
If I use my legal name or the name I used to go by, other people come up. If I use my REAL name, it's only me.

1. Become the "Garlic Queen" at a pagan festival two years in a row by deliberately seeking out the chocolate-covered garlic clove on the platter of chocolate-dipped treats. (I got disqualified after that.)
2. Been the first patient on whom around a hundred medical students have used a speculum, and lectured them on the correct method of its insertion while they did so.
3. Taught a group of nervous women my own age how to do breast self-exams correctly for the first time in their lives.
4. Been accidentally stabbed in the butt by a friend who was washing dishes.
5. Made a notorious Satanist nervous.
6. Arranged a photo session for four Nobel laureates and ascertained their taste in liquor without pissing any of them off. (This is harder than it sounds, at least with chemists.)
7. Worked in the same building with the entire supply of plutonium in the state of Missouri.
8. Spoken to someone from the FBI about the security bona fides of a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
9. Watched cockatiels and budgies hatch from their eggs.
10. Was present at the Grand Streak at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1974, when 714 students ran through the quadrangle nude. Sadly, the record only held up for a few weeks.

Re: What a seriously cool life you've had!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah hah! You used to work as a pelvic model. Very cool. Coincidentally, when I was working for AV Services at UCLA, I ran a gyno-exam video for a bunch of would-be gynecologists, so I got to sit in on the surrounding lecture. According to the instructor, UCLA pioneered the practice of training paid pelvic models who would then help train medical students.

The lecturer said that before they instituted the practice, the first exam any gynecologist was giving would be to a live patient, and roughly the first 100 or so exams a gynecologist gave were largely useless as a result. "For the first hundred exams all they could tell was that it was warm and wet." Which of course meant that roughly 100 examinees per new gynecologist weren't getting a proper exam. The lecturer also explained that while UCLA is very adamant about the importance of giving a vaginal/rectal exam to patients, they didn't demonstrate them as part of the pelvic model exam, "because you can't pay women enough money to take multiple rectal exams." It was a totally fascinating lecture. Almost made me wish I was a med student.

And I'm guessing your chemist may have known some of my physicists. When I worked at CalTech, several of the emeriti there were veterans of the Manhattan Project.

I still do it, and we are called teaching assistants

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

It's for the Standardized Patient Program at St. Louis University. We teach the full well-woman exam, including breast exam, abdominal exam and pelvic. We teach nurse practitioners, medical students and physician's assistants. Sometimes I teach 21 students in a week with my partner, who works the end of the table while I'm on it.

There's a full trained coterie of us. I missed the deadline to work Washington University as well. We have to strike a delicate balance between reassuring the students and making sure that they take us very seriously. We also remind them, that since they are working at a teaching hospital, any patient they have for the next few years could be a Standardized Patient. It keeps them on their toes. I certainly made them sit up and take notice at my gynecologist's when I walked in asking for a Peterson's speculum! There aren't too many patients who know to ask for them by size.

I do 3 exams per session, and the 7 sessions in a week was a really rough week, but we had TAs out sick. We do indeed do the vaginal/rectal exam, but sometimes we make them omit the final sweep.

It is fascinating. I'm still shaky on end of the table stuff, so I have to be the patient all of the time. I'll graduate when I get better at lecturing. I've got the breast exam down pat, but the pelvic is so darned complicated to teach.

I'll bet the Manhattan Project guys did know each other. My favorite among them just died a little while back. He did research until a year before his death, and was very interested in buckyballs. One of them's still alive, and used to go out to CalTech to use facilities out there pretty regularly 20 years ago. His name's Art Wahl. He was on the team that discovered plutonium to begin with. Most of the old guys were big peacenicks, and they had a million stories about how they got up to shenanigans in New Mexico.

The theorists all got to work right away when they got to Los Alamos, because they only needed pencils and paper, but the bench men ended up building the labs!

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

I'm intensely curious:
2: Who paid to coat the manhole cover?
(And which street had an open manhole cover afterwards?)
5: Why don't you still own it?
8: Coached in what? (I suspect is wasn't connected to the poker thing)

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Wow. You're absolutely right. I've never tried Googling myself in quotes before.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

When & where did you work as a projectionist? And was the movie that good?

There's another person with my name who usually pops up ahead of me in the Googling. She even lived in the same city as I did, once, which resulted in a very confused phone call with one of her former coworkers (until we figured out that I wasn't the, er, droid she was looking for).

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I've come very close to #7. There was a woman (last name by marriage) who had four hits on Google with my name. If I put the J. in, like I usually do, it's just me.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

I think it's great that I'm best known for my ethical relativism.

Although I wouldn't mind having the money I got for being chair of TransAmerica Corporation (owner of the rights to Felix the Cat, if I'm not mistaken). That also put me on the board of the American Film Institute, which would me right up my alley.

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

And what CAN you say about chocolate-coated manhole covers?

(For a while, you could get giant Oreos about three inches across. A friend of ours made some cocolate-coated ones. Of course we called them "manhole covers.")

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The manhole-cover thing was while I was working as personal assistant to Lex Nakashima. He was, at the time, the keeper of the "manhole cover" (which, though we called it that, was really just an access cover -- maybe 9" across) from a previous LASFS Christmas Gift Exchange (essentially, a White Elephant or Yankee Swap). He wanted to pass it on to a new victim in the next gift exchange, but the chocolate on the thing was some number of years old at that time and despite being kept in the freezer, just too manky to pass along. So, in the way of personal assistants everywhere, I got to do the dirty work. Which involved boiling quite a lot of water to cook off the old chocolate, and then microwaving quite a lot of Hersheys (why waste good chocolate?) to re-coat the thing.

The cover was an historical object already when I worked on it, so I have no idea where it originally came from, or, for that matter, whether it is still in existence. Certainly it had not circulated at the gift exchange for some time when last I attended LASFS.

***

I gave up the piece of the Deathstar (gift from someone who used to work for Industrial Light & Magic) because it had become clutter to me, and since I thought it would be far more valuable to someone who was a serious Star Wars fan, I donated it to TAFF to auction off at a Worldcon. Everyone benefits.

***

Linda McGuire (nee Gustavson) was my high school swimming coach, and swimming was what she medalled in at Mexico City. She also was in charge of the water ballet team. (Hadn't thought of that -- I bet not many of my friends have ever done water ballet, either). She was junior-most on the athletic staff at Willow Glen High the year that Prop. 13 passed, and, along with something like half of the science teachers, was promptly laid off. There's no question in my mind, though, that I would never have actually thought to join the swim team, and certainly not water ballet, if it hadn't been for Linda. Hell of a teacher.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I worked as a projectionist at Raleigh Studios, in Hollywood, in the late '80s and early '90s while I was finishing my undergraduate degree. Raleigh is the location of the original United Artists venture, and now operates as a production and post-production facility for hire. As a projectionist, I was running things like film dailies, promotional loops for CGI houses, commercial dailies, and quite a lot of foreign and independent films being screened for potential distributors, or for film reviewers. It was an incredibly cool job most of the time, if occasionally deeply tedious or insanely stressful.

While I cannot speak for Mr. Burton, I would say Bride of the Monster was a terrible movie. Wretched. Probably not the worst I had to project -- we did get a few real stinkers -- just the worst I had to go through over and over again.) But Burton was doing research for his movie, Ed Wood, and there's no doubt that the research paid off. The recreated excerpts of Bride of the Monster in Burton's movie are so letter-perfect to the original that the only way I could tell that they weren't just clips from the original is that I could tell it was Martin Landau in them, and not Bela Lugosi. I'm probably one of 10 people on the planet who can appreciate the quality of the reproduction, but I'm not one of the 3 people on the planet who care.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention, I am not surprised.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I can say quite a lot -- see my comments to Allan, above -- but I don't know how much is interesting. Chocolate-coated Oreos sound much nicer than a chocolate-covered access cover plate. Nominally edible, for one thing.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

There does seem to be a rather visible artist out there named Lynne Foy, however. No cigar, I realize.

[pip-r-lagenta.livejournal.com]

1) I have made over a million phone calls.
2) I cleaned the clubhouse of a science fiction club every week for eleven years.
3) I took viola lessons for two years, but I have never, in my life, ever touched (nor come near) a viola.
4) I have run through a swamp to capture a feral cat, succeeded, and been rewarded with years of that cat's love.
5) I have lived in the next apartment over from a woman who was (at that time) having an affair with William Shatner.
6) I have been paid by the Catholic Church to care for teenage boys... week in and week out for ten years.
7) I had Harlan Ellison buy from me a copy of a mass-produced book that he wrote, but that he did not know existed until I showed it to him.
8) I have had a character in a Star Trek novel named for me.
9) I have taken "Improvisational Comedy" lessons from a woman who taught "Improvisational Comedy" skills to Robin Williams.
10) When I was eleven years old (in 1970) I went on a school outing, with everyone in my school, into San Francisco to see the stage production of "Hair", nude scene included.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, hello Gavin. Long time. I like some of the stuff you're doing with photo manipulation very much. Especially the impressionist filtered landscapes and some of the LASFS portraits.

[pip-r-lagenta.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! I have a lot fun doing that photo manipulation stuff. That Gavin name sure brings back memories. ;)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Argh. Surest way to get a response on the internet: post something wrong. I'm sorry, Galen. Proper names are my downfall, all the more so as I steam on into middle age. Basically, one of my primary (but not in any sense deliberative) sortals for categorizing proper names is the formula First Letter/sound + Number of Syllables + Meter. Which means that on first sort, "Gavin" and "Galen" are the same name, according to the anonymous name-sorting-routines in my brain. I used to have a guy on my vanpool named "Holland" and a TA named "Houston" during the same period at UCLA, and it was sheer hell. If it makes you feel any better, I often get remembered as "Ursula".