An Appreciation Of A Doctor

Three days before I was born in 1983, my dad had a rather nasty accident at his job.

As a repair foreman in a factory, he was inspecting a portion of a boiler that wasn't working correctly. As he reached out to turn a valve, the pipe it was on exploded without warning, embedding shrapnel in his arm.

Had he attempted to inspect the gauge on the pipe visually, he very probably would have died. As it was, he had a deep, severe wound in his left arm that had severed arteries. (He had the presence of mind to press the wound, and to continue doing so even though others wanted him to take his hand off to look at it.) An injury like that could have cost him his hand.

But it didn't. He was rushed to the nearest big hospital, in Toledo, Ohio, where his arm was operated on by a Dr. John Howard. He still suffers from stiffness and a lack of motor control in his left hand, but otherwise he retains full use of his arm. (He also used to charge my siblings and I a nickel to see his scar.) If his hand had been lost, it is very possible that he could have lost his job and had a hard time finding a new one, which would have dramatically affected literally my entire life.

Dr. Howard died in mid-March, a world-famous surgeon known for greatly improving surgical techniques used on battlefields and in emergency rooms, and in numerous diseases of the pancreas. It is very likely that he touched the life of someone you know, though presumably far less directly than in my case. (On another note, it has also been rumored for many years that he inspired aspects of the character Trapper John from M*A*S*H. On a semi-related note, Dr. Howard doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia entry.)

I doubt I could muster the eloquence that he deserves, so I will simply say: While I never met Dr. Howard*, he will be missed.

*Technically, I did, and he was probably one of the first people who was neither family or maternity ward staff to come into physical contact with me, but as I was less than a month old, my memories of it are... less than perfect, shall we say.

-Signing off.

That's Not a Language

My sister and I had a small disagreement today on which language The Three Musketeers was originally written in.

She believed for some reason that it was Spanish, while I insisted that it was French.

According to Wikipedia's infobox, we were both wrong.

I... think Wikipedia might want to get someone in there to correct that.

-Signing off.

Good To Know

I've stated in the past that I'm a huge fan of information websites, particularly wikis in their various forms. I'm even prone to visiting and wikiwalking on sites on subjects that I have peripheral or no interest in. (Well, not really "no" interest so much as not enough interest to do anything beyond wikiwalk on a site about the subject. More than none, probably about the same as "peripheral.") Halopedia, the Tron Wiki, the Forgotten Realms Wiki... I've taken long wikiwalks on all of these sites despite never playing a Halo game, never having watched anything Tron, and never having played a tabletop role playing game (although I did read some Forgotten Realms novels ages ago).

So occasionally, I'll seek out a new wiki to peruse merely for the sake of doing so. An image catches my eye, or I read a mention of something on another site, and my curiosity is piqued.

Wiki quality varies wildly from site to site. The best on the internet are TV Tropes and the TFWiki. (Wikipedia is too unfocused to even rank in my top ten.) And then, sometimes you find hilarious things that take themselves entirely seriously, such as this remark from the "Appearance" section of the body of this page, about a character named Ezra Urza Erza Scarlet:

"Like most female characters [in the series that this wiki is for], she has extremely large breasts." (Bolding added for emphasis, italics added for more differenter emphasis.)

...

That's... nice to know, isn't it?

-Signing off.

Wiki Weirdness

I've commented in the past that I go on wikis and hit the random button, even on Wikipedia.

The other day, I was doing so, and noticed something kind of strange:



What's going on here? Seriously.

Wikis: My Own Personal Hobby

I like wikis a lot. How much? I have fifteen wikis in my favorites list. Some of them are for things I'm only marginally interested in (Star Trek, for instance). I like wikis that much.

There are "weak" wikis, whose low staff results in every single article they contain having cleanup tags (see the GaoGaiGar-Betterman wiki for an example of this). Some wikis just fall short of their potential (see the ReBoot wiki-it's got typos galore). Some are horribly formatted. (Last time I checked, the Digimon wiki [yes, I've read the Digimon wiki-shut it up, you] had horrible gigantic lists as pages that not only took forever to load but froze up windows just from attempts to scroll for five to ten minutes at a time on a brand new computer.)

Then there are the wikis that are legitimately good. The One Piece wiki is very well put together, for instance.

Then, there is the king of wikis, the alpha and omega: Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki. Why is this wiki so great? Because it looks at its own fandom and content in a critical, clever, and humorous way, and is still highly objective and informative.

As for why I like wikis in general: The random button. I love random buttons. I'll even go to freaking Wikipedia and hit the random button. (You'd be surprised how often I found something good that way.)