August 1998

• Today is the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Mounties (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), to many the international symbol of Canada.
  (30 August 98)

• A new thang is featured from Dr. Dave's Museum.
  (29 August 98)

• I've posted text and images from my recent Sauna Tour of Japan and hatsubon.
  (23 August 98)

• We Are The Champions
  Team Teal won the Oak Bay Summer Recreational Hockey League Championship tonight by defeating our season-long archrivals Team Green 3-2. Our opponents had scouted us well, and completely shut down our usual scorers. This game I finally started to convert my teammates' generous passes and got two goals, but it was a total team effort, from the goalie's clutch save on a second-period breakaway, to the mobile defence, to the tenaciously forechecking forwards. In the arena's upstairs bar, over complimentary nachos (our prize) and Piper's Pale Ale, we savoured and rehashed our hard-fought victory for almost as long as it took to play it!

  The Fall League will be starting 14 September 1998; phone Oak Bay Recreation Centre at (250) 598-4625 to register. It should be fun, but I can't play because I'm moving away. :-(
  (22 August 98)

• School's Out For (What's Left Of) Summer
  The summer session at the University of Victoria ended today. So did my enrollment as a student there: as of next month, I will be transferring my informatics studies to another school, where I will also be able to do pathology work on the side!
  (21 August 98)

• I have started a one-month pathology locum (temporary position) providing summer replacement help to the Department of Laboratory Services of Victoria's Capital Health Region. After a whole summer of taking in new informatics information, it is nice to be back on familiar ground again. Well, sort of familiar. My week had an interesting start:

  Something fishy about heart, lungs VICTORIA BC -- A forensic pathologist has confirmed that a heart and lungs fished out of Victoria's Inner Harbour Monday are not human. Police were relatively sure the organs hadn't come from a person, but took the precaution of having them examined by an expert. The discovery was being treated as a criminal matter until it was known for sure the material was from an animal. The organs were found about 5 p.m. Monday. Police were told later that a person had been seen at the Inner Harbour Sunday cleaning what appeared to be a porpoise, leading them to believe that is where the heart and lungs came from.

  --Victoria Times-Colonist, 19 August 1998 (Thanks to Lisa Lapointe, Coroner, for clipping this article)

  Porpoises (and their fellow cetaceans dolphins and whales) are not fish but marine mammals, warm-blooded former land animals that have adapted to life in the ocean. As such, their internal organs look very similar to ours. I was presented with a thoracic block that at first glance could have come from a human. On closer inspection, the lungs were unilobar and about 50% larger than the corresponding human organs. The giveaway was the whole fish skeleton stuck in the esophagus!

  Dolphin Anatomy
  A Pathologist's Report of a Dolphin Autopsy (20 August 98)

• I've made my U-turn from obon. I think I will call this my Sauna Tour of Japan -- the daily high temperature was 32-35 C. Ugh! Photos are presently in for developing ...
  (16 August 98)

• Code Writer in the Sky
  The video apparatus on my plane to Japan was out of order, so I had the whole flight to prepare the online version of my curriculum vitae (that's academicspeak for "resume").
  (12 August 98)

• Hatsubon no tame ni Nihon ni ikimasu.
  (11 August 98)
  

• There's an update at the Nikkei Nexus.
  (09 August 98)

• Dollar Dive! Loon Swoon!
  The Canadian dollar continues to decline in value versus the American dollar -- 65 cents today; where will it stop? Most people are expressing concern about the loonie's four-month-long slide that began in April, but as the cover story of this week's Maclean's Magazine points out, it is part of a long-term downward trend that began 25 years ago, the last time the Canuck buck was worth more than its US counterpart (I actually remember that!). A high national debt, onerous taxes, low productivity, a lack of competitiveness and an overreliance on natural resources are cited as reasons, all problems that don't have overnight solutions! Luckily for me, the currency of my next travel destination has been having an equally rough ride of late.
  Infoseek's Currency Exchange
  Faster, Bigger, Better: Canada's Productivity Problem
  Canadian Standard of Living Predicted to Drop (07 August 98)

• Today is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of an A-bomb. Though the Americans dropped the weapon, Canadians were instrumental its development. This year's commemoration in Hiroshima was attended by surviving members of a group from the Northwest Territories Dene nation who during the War hauled the uranium ore used to make the bomb. They were victims too: they were not told the ore was radioactive, and many developed fatal cancer.
  Our Hiroshima An NFB film about Canada's involvement in nuclear weapons research
  (06 August 98)

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