moftasa.net

“Hey doc,” the police officer greeted. “I remember you. How you doing?”

“I’m alright, how about you?” I answered. He saw me push the button on the panel to call an elevator heading down. I wondered how he knew I was a doctor. It was the end of the work day and I had already bundled up in my long winter coat and scarf. I did not recognize him.

“I’m okay, thank you,” he said. He gestured to the other side of the building and asked, “You’re not working over there today?”

“Oh, I never work over there,” I said. He was referring to the psychiatric units. “I run around the hospital and work as a psychiatrist on the medical and surgical floors.”

“Ooooh, I see,” he answered. The elevator chimed its arrival. I wondered if he had seen me during a “psychiatric code” in the hospital. (A “psychiatric code” is when someone—it need not be a patient—is severely behaviorally agitated in the hospital.) I didn’t know how else our paths could have crossed.

I should pay more attention to who is present during those things.

I thought I heard him say, “Are you ready to go home?”

“Yes,” I answered, stepping into the elevator. He fished out a single silver key on the large hoop of keys that dangled from his belt loop.

“Okay,” he said, inserting the key into a slot on the elevator panel. “We’ll get you home as soon as possible.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, suddenly aware of what he was doing. “I thought you asked, ‘Are you ready to go home’, not ‘Are you in a rush to go home’! I’m not in a rush, it’s okay, really.”

“No no no,” he said. The elevator doors were closing and he turned the key in the slot. “We’ll skip all the floors and I’ll backtrack upstairs after we get you to the ground floor.”

“No, really, it’s okay,” I insisted. “I’m really not in a rush.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he continued. The elevator began its descent. I caught sight of the panel atop the elevator doors and saw the numbers rapidly change as we passed each floor. People were waiting on the other side of the doors and this elevator was ignoring their requests for a stop.

I stifled a sigh.

“You see, this way you don’t have to stop at every single floor on the way down,” he said.

“But that’s okay,” I said, realizing that my protests were now in vain. “I don’t mind.” We’re all just trying to get home.

His ring of keys dangled from the elevator panel. The elevator continued its uninterrupted descent.

“That’s a valuable key you have there,” I said feebly. “You’ve got a lot of power with that thing.”

He chuckled. “You’ve got a lot of power as a doctor.”

I said nothing. My lips smiled. My eyes didn’t.

The elevator smoothly halted at the ground floor and the doors slid open.

“Thank you,” I quietly said, hurrying out. I hoped my voice did not betray my discomfort.

“No problem,” the police officer called from the elevator. “Have a good night.”

Yesterday morning we visited the Darling Wind Farm. In addition to the three windmills in the photo, there is a fourth behind me. Those four generate enough electricity to fulfill 80% of Darling’s current energy needs.

Of course, not every community is windy enough to justify wind-powered renewable energy, but there are plenty of windy places like Darling that could meet most of their energy needs by installing just a few turbines.

David Sasaki

Are you heading to South Africa and worried that you won’t be able to enjoy the very best of metrosexual hospitality. Check out the Rosebank Hotel, probably the only hotel I’ve ever been to which is much more impressive in person than on its website. It is just two blocks away from the Rosebank Mall and, for all you cyber-enthusiasts, from the offices of the African Commons Project.

The lobby has lots of smiling faces and the kind of lighting that makes everyone look pretty:

Plus there’s this underwater garden lounge type thing that looks like the perfect place to drink too many gin and tonics:

Also appropriate for confined debauchery are the cocktail pods:

The rooms have all the added touches: slippers by the bed, flower petals on the pillows, and, get this, mirrored-glass that looks out on the rest of the room from the shower:

All that was missing was the accompanying super model. Well, you don’t get everything.

Most impressive of all, though, was the restaurant and its mammoth breakfast spread:

The rest of my photos are on Flickr.

David Sasaki

Mysterious sheets of plastic appeared on the railings of the Cairo Opera House on 17th November. The railings separate the Opera grounds from the busy central artery of Tahrir Street, an extension of the Qasr El-Nil bridge popular with ambulant lovers taking evening strolls.

The sheets’ function was revealed the following day when guests of the Cairo International Film Festival made their appearance at the opening ceremony, parading the red carpet in their diamante-studded, perfumed glory. The sheets had been strategically-placed to protect the good and the grand of Hollywood and Spain and Egypt from the unwholesome, hungry stares of Egypt’s hoi polloi.

Rows of security guards along the red carpet, a 100 metre gap and metal railings were apparently not enough to protect the A-listers from whatever mischief the CIFF/Opera organisers feared the no-listers would engage in: they were not prepared to risk the evening being defiled by the uninvited participation of the unimportant in any form.

This attitude – exclusion - seems to be the ethos of the 32 year-old festival. 2008 was my second film festival, and I have yet to understand who, exactly, it is for. Article 1 of the CIFF regulations (available on its lamentably inaccurate website, about which more later) states the following:

The goal of The Cairo International Film Festival is to promote films, to create artistic links between different nations, to encourage comprehension and meetings between cinema professionals around the world and to develop the Film industry in the Arab world, in the Middle East and all over the world

As I understand it, this goal encompasses behind-the-sheets ordinary people of all nationalities, (“different nations”) and actors, film directors and producers and journalists (“cinema professionals”). In short it means everybody.

In theory.

The reality is very different. The most important thing to bear in mind for the uninitiated is that the CIFF takes place in Cairo, which is in Egypt, which – for all its wonderful qualities - remains a class-ridden autocracy of individual fiefdoms where rules are designed to fit wallets and who you know is more important than who you are.

This stratification has necessarily seeped into all areas of the CIFF. Witness Omar Sherif’s remarks in the opening ceremony about Egyptians being poor but “always smiling…smiling at the sun and the blue sky, and knowing that if they don’t get their reward in this life they’ll get it in the next”. Which is perhaps why it doesn’t matter that the smiling buffoons had been kept behind the sheets.

Within the CIFF fiefdom Hollywood has most currency, followed by Egyptian stars, followed by popular Turkish soap opera actors. This year Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Susan Sarandon, Charlize Theron, Julia Ormond and Mira Sorvino brought the LA starlight to the Festival, guarded by Amr Badr, a cigar-smoking individual whose job as far as I can tell is to keep members of the lower species known as the press as far away from his charges as possible. We were batted away like flies.

The flights and accommodation of these guests are paid for by the Festival. Is it conscionable that in a week’s stay in Cairo they are brought out for only 1 or 2 press conferences and spend the rest of the time sight-seeing? The question again poses itself: who is the CIFF for?

CIFF’s relationship with the press is a story in itself. I attended ten CIFF events (film screenings/press conferences/symposiums) this year, only five of which went without a hitch. Finding out about the timing of these events was in itself a challenge because I made the mistake of relying on the CIFF website, whose schedule is as reliable as a pubescent teenager.

I went to the Good News cinema on Sunday expecting to watch Fawzeyya’s Secret Recipe. Having been informed that it was playing in the main auditorium I waited as a press conference for another film came to an end. It ended, and I was then ejected from the auditorium “so it could be cleaned.”

I went back upstairs to the smaller screen where I located the man who had given me the wrong information. “No, Fawzeyya is playing here, and it’s for the judging committee only.” No apology was offered, no explanation.

I didn’t have the chance to ask why he had chosen to neglect communicating this minor detail to me an hour ago, because next to me an extremely angry Palestinian woman was trying to extract some sense out of a Good News employee.

She had come specifically to watch Palestinian film Salt of This Sea, at the Good News cinema. The problem is, Salt of This Sea had at some point been moved to the Opera Creativity Centre. I had found this detail out entirely by chance two hours before, from the film’s director herself. God knows how many people missed the film because of the organisers’ failure to update the website.

The woman said that this was the second time she encountered this problem. The Good News man said he wasn’t responsible, that the CIFF organisers bore responsibility. But of course.

(Unfortunately, it was crap) I got to see Fawzeyya’s Secret Recipe in the end, seated on the cinema floor (no problem, I have a press card, I wasn’t paying) with my friend (who had paid for a seat).

When I went to the Creativity Centre to watch Under the Bombs on Wednesday I was accompanied by the same press pass-less friend. Not a problem since the CIFF website announced the screening as open to the press and public.

They refused to let my friend in at first on the pretext that attendance was by invitation only, and that we had to go to the press centre to get an invitation. Tired and frustrated by a week of similar incidents I must admit that I lost my rag with the Creativity Center official who told me that in fact no, I had not seen an (American) friend admitted into the Creativity Center without an invitation earlier this week to watch Salt of This Sea. I had. He wasn't having any of it.

Voices were raised, as was blood pressure, until another Creativity Center official took my friend aside, took an invitation (for an entirely different film) out of his pocket and gave it to him saying “this is my fiancee’s but I’m giving it to you”(!) before admitting him.

Is there an equivalent word for ‘je m’en foutisme’ in English? Its literal translation is not giving a damn-ism, and should be the CIFF’s motto.

On Friday I turned up at 11.30 a.m. for a symposium on human rights. A CIFF official appeared at 11.45 a.m. and announced that the symposium would begin at 1 p.m. “as had been stated on official invitations.” Some of us lower-level amoeba hadn’t received this invitation. Who cares. Our time isn’t important, after all.

The not giving a damn extends to guests, too. Annemarie Jacir, director of Salt of This Sea told me that some of the actors and crew involved in her film had been invited to the Festival, and that visas would be waiting for them at Cairo Airport.

Then, she told me via email, this happened:

Then they 'suddenly' couldn't help us and told us 3 days before flying that there would be no visas for them at the airport nor would they help get them one. So it was urgent because Ossama [Bawardi, the Palestinian producer] had a flight landing him in Cairo airport and suddenly was told he had no visa to enter. The festival wouldn't even help us change the flight or give any solutions so I ended up paying myself for a new ticket since Cairo fest refused to take responsibility for it. I am of course totally broke and it cost us a lot of money that we simply don't have.
CIFF had “discovered” that Jacir’s Palestinian crew members hold Israeli passports and summarily dropped them.

This is aside from the fact that upon arriving in Cairo Jacir was hustled into a symposium at the last minute. She had no prior idea what the symposium was about or what was expected of her. Aleya Hammad, the symposium’s moderator (who in an urgent whisper asked her who she was while she was on the podium), described Jacir’s feature film as a documentary.

At the beginning of Charlize Theron’s press conference, as photographers and cameramen fought in front of her to get the good angles, press conference moderator Ezzet Abo Auf said (in Arabic) “let’s have some order, we don’t want to look bad in front of our guests.”

This obsession with image. With makeup, and fireworks, and revolving stages that spin out their startled occupants as the crowd claps and the music plays and ugly reality is kept at bay outside, 100 metres and a million miles away behind a plastic sheet.

I reject the argument that because CIFF is held in Egypt, we should forgive it the incompetence of its organisation, the constant screw-ups, the continual late starts, the complete absence of a relationship with the press…etc.

That stuff (independent political parties, World Cup bids, independent film festivals, historical parliamentary buildings, police-citizen relations) is repeatedly messed up in Egypt is clearly not because of some entrenched incompetence within the fabric of Egyptian society. Rather, the problem is twofold: firstly, talent is usually inextricably linked with creativity, and original thought, and is therefore a potential risk. Secondly, raw natural talent lacking the benefits of wealth and connections is necessarily crushed by poverty and its associated concrete ceilings.

Which means, inevitably, that many of those at the top are dullards, and all take care of interests other than those of the many million they are meant to represent.

CIFF - like everything else in Egypt - is the embodiment of these factors, the embodiment of this calamity. Its mistakes therefore aren’t just minor errors, or the product of good ole Egyptians and their quaint time-keeping. Rather, they are the manifestation of a sickness.


noreply@blogger.com (Scarr)

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa. I am here thanks to a blog post by Matthew Buckland, a comment left by Mohamed Nanabhay, and the kind invitation of Simon Barber of the International Marketing Council of South Africa. Starting on November 30 I will be part of a ten-day “bloggers roadshow” in which bloggers from the U.S. will join their South African counterparts and tour the country’s hotspots of technological innovation and tourism.

I’ll be joined by fellow American bloggers Renee Blodgett and Ray Lewis of down the avenue, Zadi Diaz of Epic Fu, Mona Gable from the Huffington Post, John Gartner of Matter Network, Chris Morrison of Venture Beat, Eliane Fioret of Uber Gizmo, and Graeme Wood of The Smart Set and The Atlantic.

Also present will be South African bloggers Simon Barber of Brand South Africa, Nick Haralambous of SA Rocks, and Ndumiso Ngcobo, irreverent author of “Some of My Best Friends are White” (which I hope to pick up and read).

All of our blog posts during the 10-day trip will be aggregated and featured on We Blog the World.

I have finally added a disclosure page to this here blog so that it is completely transparent whenever I get any perks for what I write about. Which begs the question, why is the International Marketing Council of South Africa inviting a bunch of bloggers to come tour and write about their country? According to their website:

Blogging is one of the most powerful forms of communication today. Top bloggers are global opinion-formers, read widely by media and decision makers in the public and private sectors. Because blogging features direct personal opinion, there is no sense of mediated messages - the writer tells it like it is.

They aren’t the only ones who think that bloggers are serious influencers. A couple months ago a few of my friends were kicking it with Bill Clinton the evening before his foundation’s big annual meeting. It has always been standard procedure to call a press conference before such an event to help attract attention, but this time around, one of Clinton’s adviser’s must have convinced him that it was more worthwhile to invite bloggers instead of traditional journalists. Whether this is because bloggers are more likely to repeat talking points instead of asking hard-hitting questions or because some bloggers have actually become more influential than their mainstream counterparts is something I’m still trying to figure out.

Trade Versus Aid

Do I have any problems getting carted around in luxury with the expectation that I will have nice things to write about a country positioning itself to receive more foreign investment? Not so much. First of all, I write what my eyes see not what’s expected of me (which has lost me a few small battles, but I still think it is the way to go). Second, I have no problem with showering some deserved attention on Africa’s first all-electric car or the region’s impressive open source software community. Other topics might be more sensitive - like discussing Soweto’s history without getting into contemporary South African race relations or weighing out the pros and cons of modern mining. But what I am sure about is that the world would not be worse off with some more positive coverage of a country like South Africa.

At TED Africa the main discussion thread could be summed up with three little words: trade versus aid. Many of the attendees argued that development aid is paternalistic, often ends up doing more harm than good (funding corrupt regimes), and creates an unhealthy post-colonial dependence in which only certain communities learn the NGO parlance and therefore benefit from its money. These laptop-toting tech savvy critics argued that rather than giving money away to inefficient development programs, well-meaning foreign governments and philanthropists should be investing in Africa’s up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

The counter-argument is that great ideas don’t always lead to sustainable companies, or even great products. Good accounting, robust marketing, multiple channels of distribution, and efficient business organization are all parts of the picture and they are the skills that development programs try to instill in their participants.

One of my guiding questions throughout the South Africa Blogger’s Roadshow will be, Should the international development community focus its priorities and budgets on traditional USAID-style development programs or should it be investing - through low interest loans - in the kinds of technological and scientific start-ups that we’ll be getting to know on the tour? Also, as a leader in Southern Africa, how can South Africa’s business community spread entrepreneurialism throughout the region without having a negative impact on local cultures, sovereignty, and the environment?

David Sasaki

noreply@blogger.com (Embee)

The Egyptian government says it has placed a ban on Egyptian doctors going to work in Saudi Arabia.(author unknown)

A protest in the Ghazl El-Mahalla spinning factory necessitated another memorable trip in a 7-seater Peugeot on Thursday, this time driven by a man with the world’s foulest mouth.

Short, dishevelled and unshaven in a striped t-shirt, he had a bar-fighting attitude to driving - while the bloke across the room may not have been looking at his bird, he probably was.

The blokey cockiness was probably in part encouraged by the two insalubrious-looking types next to him on the front seat. One of this pair spent the first ten minutes conducting an animated mobile phone call in which he informed his interlocuteur and everyone else in the Peugeot that he had “flogged the car for a grand” and “had Mohamed so and so’s licence” and wouldn’t sell it for less than 50 quid. “Fuck no, 50 quid or nothing” he declared.

He had a dirty laugh of the best kind. The rumbling sort. A filthy old engine starting up.

The journey started with a tape of Qu’ran recitation, to ensure a safe journey. The driver and the dirty laugh man talked up front, exchanging jokes, gripes and cigarettes while the slightly younger and timid-looking man sat between them acted as a buffer for the stream of profanities they emitted.

Listening to the driver was like watching Goodfellas dubbed into Arabic. Nothing escaped his venom. Kossom [fuck*] this and the ebn el weskha [son of a slut] that. It was spectacularly vile language for a Thursday afternoon, particularly given that swear words are frowned on in Egyptian society much more than e.g. England, where one can not give a flying fuck audibly in public without raising many eyebrows.

The Qu’ran was eventually replaced by a tape of sha3by mawwal, which was when the fun really began. This cassette we were treated to was obviously a particular favourite of the driver’s, and he bellowed out the lyrics (sometimes in advance of the singer actually saying them). When not singing, he danced, requiring the use of his torso, and both hands.

“Aho…aho…” [there it is…there it is…] he said to Dirty Laugh while shoulder shimmying with both hands off the wheel, and looking at Dirty Laugh. Dirty Laugh smoked and nodded approvingly, apparently unconcerned that we were going at 90 kilometres an hour on the Delta road and that control of the car had been sacrificed for boogie wonderland.

A particularly rousing chorus suddenly inspired the driver to clap noisily and at length, again while we sped along and vehicles zigzagged behind us and in front of us like video game space invaders. I can’t say I blame him. Sometimes musical needs must.

We stopped three times. The first time all three men got out, opened the bonnet, revved the engine once manually, and then got back in. In silence. The second time the driver parked the car on the side of the motorway, sort of, and then asked whether anybody wanted something to drink before the three men absented themselves for about five minutes. The last time we stopped, the driver didn’t have time to steer to the side of the road because he was too busy going through the A-Z of swear words.

Traffic had almost come to a halt for some reason, and while we crawled along a lorry to our right very slightly cut the driver up.

“YA OSTA! YA OSTA!” [Oi, driver!] dirty laugh bellowed out of his window, prompting absolutely no response from the lorry driver, probably because he couldn’t hear him up in his cab.

Driven wild by this atrocity the driver sprang out of his car and delivered a verbal assault of astounding proportions involving the lorry driver’s mother, homosexuals and pimps. He jumped up and down while clenching his fists by his sides. Dirty laugh looked on impassively, smoking as usual, as if he was at the cinema.

The driver returned to his car eventually (still swearing), opening his door from the inside, and was only pacified by a cigarette.

Another encounter occurred when a microbus driver decided to overtake us at approximately 100 kilometres an hour, on our right. The manoeuvre forced him off the road slightly, into the dust, and a sleeping passenger in our Peugeot was suddenly woke up by a hail of mud and pebbles hitting him in the face.

The microbus sped off in a cloud of dust while in front the driver’s face slowly turned red.

“I’ll get that fucking son of the bitch at the road bumps,” he hissed.

And indeed he did. Traffic slowed down and we were soon side by side with the microbus.

A 3-way conversation then ensued between the microbus driver, our driver, and dirty laugh. Driver ended every literally sentence he said with “ebn el weskha”, e.g. “mesh sama3 bey2ol aih ebn el weskha dah” [I can’t hear what that son of a slut is saying] he said, as he reluctantly turned down his sha3by mawwal and leaned towards the passenger side of the car. This carried on for about two minutes (while we were still moving, and cars piled up behind us) until the microbus driver handed our driver a packet of biscuits, and then it was over.

The driver opened the biscuits and consumed them, while still cursing the microbus driver.

He only interrupted this process to curse the speed bumps we encountered, in the process of being made. He dismissed them as "mattabaat sena3y bent weskha” [fucking speed bumps], before railing against the people making them, who were of course welaad el weskha.

Arriving in Mahalla with my swearword vocabulary doubled, I found a very different scene to the last time I had been to the town. Medan Shoon, the scene of April’s clashes was sleepy, with barely a policeman in sight. Last time I had been here it had looked like a military barracks.


On our way to the factory journalist Per Bjorklund and I saw a stream of people coming from the direction of the factory. Per correctly identified them as workers, who it transpired had been let out early, an attempt by state security to control the size of the protest.

A group of women stopped me, asking if I was a journalist before they caught sight of Per. Who is Swedish and looks it.

“ALLAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3EYNAYK GAMILA GEDDAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [WOW! YOUR EYES ARE REALLY GORGEOUS!] she cooed/screeched at Per. Who smiled a twinkly smile with his heavenly Scandinavian blue eyes.

I managed to extract from the women that the 3 p.m. shift had been let out early from the factory before they returned to the theme of Per and his eyes.

Outside the factory a group of women waited, flanked by the usual state security men in tight jeans and sunglasses. I recognised one of them from the Mahalla 49 trial. He never ever lets me in to the courtroom until the last possible moment.

I also remembered a state security officer I had seen outside the Doctors’ Syndicate last week. An underling brought him a chair, before wiping it clean for him. After el basha had sat down the underling, a kid of no more than 22, held his coffee for him. But to ensure that it was at the correct height he bent over at back-breaking angle while el basha talked on the phone, just froze in that position. One of the more nauseating sights I have witnessed recently.

I’ve heard that Ghazl El-Mahalla women tend to spearhead protests in the factory, and today seemed to be no exception. “El sa7afa fein?” [where’s the press?] they chanted, as they waited to either enter the factory, or for their male colleagues to join them.

They entered the factory eventually. Their male colleagues were assembled in the factory’s central courtyard. A fight ensued with factory security about whether the women would be admitted into the courtyard. They were, and the women flocked through, journos sneaking through in the middle of them.


Protests have a unique sort of energy, and experiencing them is always inspiring. This is particularly true of Egyptian protests, where participants in them risk so much. Individuals who lead chants know that they will be noted, a mark placed against their name, and yet they risk all.

At one point during the protest I was standing near the gates, and overhead a man saying of the participants “dowl schwayet 3ayyal malohomsh lazma” [they’re a bunch of useless kids] and of a woman protestor, “bent el weskha bet3mel fadee7a” [a daughter of a slut making a scandal]. It wasn’t the Peugeot driver, I checked.

* Commenter Fully P has pointed out that 'fuck' conceals the true vileness of the literal meaning of this word, which is 'your mother's cunt'. Since this delicate expression isn't a popular term of abuse in English, I chose the nearest equivalent. 'Cunting' might have been an alternative, if that exists outside Croydon. But the absence of the mother from this again misses the gynacological intensity of the Arabic.noreply@blogger.com (Scarr)

The term phonagnosia refers to an inablity to recognize familiar voices or to discriminate between unfamiliar ones. This is a rare condition that is usually associated with brain damage: the ability to recognize familiar voices is impaired by damage to several regions of the right parietal lobe, and impaired voice discrimination is associated with damage to the temporal lobe in both hemispheres.

Researchers from UCL now report the first known case of developmental phonagnosia. In the journal Neuropsychologia, they document the case of a 60-year-old woman known as K.H., who says that she has been unable to recognize familiar voices for as long as she can remember.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Mo none@example.com

Uh oh. Your patient is crying. What to do? What to do?

(1) Do not reflexively refer the patient to a psychiatrist.
(2) Do not reflexively refer the patient to a psychiatrist.
(3) Do not reflexively refer the patient to a psychiatrist.

That hasty referral sends the message that (1) it’s not okay to cry, (2) I don’t want to see you cry (or I can’t tolerate seeing you cry), and (3) there must be something wrong with you since you are crying. (”Not only do you have Medical Condition X, but you might be mentally ill, too!”)

Crying can be a completely natural and expected response to information. Furthermore, there is variation in how people respond to news; some express more overt emotions than others. You also don’t know what else is going on in the patient’s life; sometimes your news is actually the single straw—as unremarkable as it may be—that, according to the proverb, breaks the camel’s back.

“But! But! But!” you may protest. “I know all of that, but I just don’t have the time to deal with that kind of stuff! I don’t want to ask more about it and then open the floodgates and have this person bawl in my office for hours and hours. I’m not a therapist; I’m a doctor. My job is to take care of the patient’s (uterus, blood pressure, alcohol use, diabetes, whatever)!”

Ah ha. You and your patient don’t share the same agenda.

Well, part of your job is to help comfort the patient. Although curing disease may seem like the primary function of medicine, the reason why we try to cure disease is to maximize quality of life and optimize function. We don’t encourage people to stop smoking “just” because we want them to stop smoking; we encourage them to stop smoking so that they can breathe easier for as many years as possible and minimize the development of other conditions like emphysema, COPD, and lung cancer in their futures, which, as you know, will (likely adversely) affect the quality of their lives. Although medicine has made some remarkable advances, we can’t cure everything and sometimes, the best thing we can “do” is offer comfort. Additionally, comfort in of itself can maximize quality of life; there’s something about sharing a burden with someone else that can make life seem less laborious and more tolerable.

So your patient is crying and you can’t cure crying. You’re astute, though, and realize that the crying means something. In our culture, crying is not embraced and, in the vast majority of cases, if someone is crying in front of you, s/he is significantly distressed and is trying not to cry. (Think of all the people who have apologized for crying, as if it is something to be ashamed of.)

Yes, it can be hard to see people cry. It’s uncomfortable. There’s that strong urge to make them stop—because if they stop crying, that must mean they feel better, right? Then there’s the fear that we are the ones doing something that’s causing them to cry (is it always about us?). Or the fear that they will continue to cry forever and forever (see above).

Contrary to popular fears, crying does not last forever. The emotion that underlies crying will also not persist forever. That emotion may not disappear completely, but it will abate enough so that the individual will eventually stop crying. This doesn’t even take into account the social pressures we experience to refrain from crying in public (see above). Remember these points.

You don’t have to do anything if your patient is crying. Sometimes, the best course of action is to just be with the patient. The gives the message that (1) it’s okay to cry, (2) I’m not going to freak out just because you’re crying, and (3) maybe the best response to the situation is to cry.

“But! But! But!” you protest again. “You’re not listening! I don’t have the time to deal with that kind of stuff! I habitually run late and I’ve got all these other patients waiting for me! What am I supposed to do?”

Suggestions:

(1) Acknowledge the situation in a calm manner. Please note that this does not mean that you should bluntly describe the situation: “You are crying. I don’t have time to be with you while you cry.” Just because you’re pressed for time does not give you the license to lack civility. Try: “This is understandably upsetting. I’m afraid that I cannot spend the time with you that I’d like to due to the clinic schedule.” Your overt recognition of the situation acknowledges the patient’s experience. Sometimes, that in itself can be healing. People don’t like to be ignored.

(2) Communicate that you are concerned about the patient and, though there may be nothing you can do to “fix” the situation, you would like to offer what you can. That “something” can be a modified version of “being” with the patient. If you are in an inpatient setting, you can offer to visit the patient again later on in the day to briefly check in on how s/he’s doing. If you’re in an outpatient setting, you can offer to the patient the opportunity to wait in the waiting room until s/he feels calmer and then you can briefly pop out to check in on how s/he’s doing between patients. Or you can offer to call the patient in a day or two to check in. Please note that these are just “offers”. Don’t foist yourself on patients; some people are already feeling mortified about crying in front of you and don’t want reminders that they committed this heinous act. Some people may seek comfort in other places and people. And, to be sure: Make sure you actually do these things if you say you’re going to do them. People like integrity.

(3) Ask the patient what would be most helpful in that moment. If you don’t know what to do, ask for help. You can qualify this statement with something about your packed clinic schedule if time is slipping away from you. This inquiry communicates that you respect the patient’s opinion, that this is a collaborative effort, and that you want to help. It is the rare patient (or human being, really) who will scowl at you and bark, “Well, you’re the doctor, you should know!” in response to that question.

For most physicians, a crying patient is a low-incident event. This partially explains why doctors may feel as uncomfortable as they do when a patient does cry during the appointment. This occasion, however, need not instill fear: This can be a grand opportunity to heal, even when you cannot cure.

In another long string of website services blocked in the Republic of Turkey, yet another blog service has been blocked: Blogspot.com. A court in Diyarbakir Turkey has banned Blogger/Blogspot.com in relation to an intellectual property infringement case. First-time Global Voices blogger, Adam Klempner, translates some of the Turkish bloggers reactions.

From Armut [tr]:

T.C. Diyarbakır 1. Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi 20.10.2008 tarih ve 2008/2761 sayılı kararı gereği günlük sayfama erişimin engellendiğini öğrendim, ne bir duruşma çağrısı, ne bir karar, ne bir tebliğ aldım, yargısız infaz edildim, sesim soluğum kesildi sansürlendim.

İki yıldır bağırıyoruz, internet sitelerini TV kanalı gibi gören bir kanun, koltuk sevdasından bu kanuna arka çıkanlar, bu kanun sayesinde Türkiye'de istediği siteyi yasaklatabileceğini bilen hainler ile bunlara maşa olan cahil vatandaşlarımız yüzünden kendi kendimizi mağdur ediyoruz.

So what is the criteria for a website to be banned in Turkey? Elma+Alt+Shift explains:

Blogger banned in Turkey!

Since the beginning till today…
Google groups, porn sites, slide.com, wordpress, YouTube… Blogger.com is the latest addition to this list of banned web sites in Turkey.
After the passing of the new law, web sites in Turkey can be banned without a warning for several reasons:
- Obscenity: This of course leads to a whole lot of questions like “How to define obscenity”
- Promoting drug use
- Provoking suicide: Another open-to-interpretation clause. Would a movie about a suicidal teenager be promoting suicide?
- Sexual abuse of children
- Insult to Turkishness and Ataturk
- Prostitution
- Gambling
- Providing material harmful to public health
Although the law, passed seemingly to fight child porn, when the statistics are examined, the main reason of the banning of web sites, seems to be obscenity, which is 3 times more than sites shut down for child molestation.
Besides these clauses, personal insult can lead to the banning of the web site as it happenened with Adnan Oktar vs. Richard Dawkins in which Adnan Oktar, a religious writer, claimed Richard Dawkins web site was insulting his book. Therefore. The web site of a well known scientist was shut down to Turkish users with a singfle click. Adnan Oktar seems to be the reason of many other web site bannings lately, including the web site of one of the biggest newspaper’s in Turkey (Vatan) and ateist forum.
Sites are shut down, without a single warning to the owner and instead of removing the specific harmful material in question, web servers are shut down completely leading millions of web site and blog owners frustrated. That’s what has happened with geocities.com and unfortunately with blogger.com as of today (October, 24th 2008).

Undoubtedly the banning of yet more Turkish blogger's voices has left a large web-community outraged. Protest movements of Turkish netizens are already in place from earlier website bannings, the details of the movement can be found at www.sansuresansur.org. You can trust Global Voices to keep an eye on this developing situation.

alaa

Related Articles

A case of sadomasochistic transference: the analyst's contributions to perverse enactments.

Psychoanal Q. 2008 Oct;77(4):1147-78

Authors: Zeitner RM

A young woman who came for treatment of anxiety and depression is presented in a detailed case report. She developed an erotized transference that was predominantly sadomasochistic and included her intention to torture and castrate the analyst. The author demonstrates how the analyst's behavior, including countertransference contributions, assisted in shaping the vicissitudes of sadomasochistic transference paradigms. A collusion was established between patient and analyst in a manner that enabled the analytic dyad to work productively toward an eventual resolution of the patient's conflicts. The author discusses the case's complexities pertaining to enactments, while emphasizing the importance of carefully monitoring and addressing countertransference experiences that mold and shape such a collusion.

PMID: 18942501 [PubMed - in process]

Zeitner RM

There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a better predictor of future academic success than his or her IQ score. In other words, willpower trumped raw intelligence.

But what cortical muscles are behind self-control? An excellent Boston Globe article summarizes some current research and future projects:

Most recently, Yale University researchers found that delaying gratification involves an area of the brain, the anterior prefrontal cortex, that is known to be involved in abstract problem-solving and keeping track of goals. For example: You want to drive across town, so you find your keys, start your car, and navigate the route, all while that critical brain region keeps the overarching trip goal in your mind.

The brain scan findings from 103 subjects suggest that delaying gratification involves the ability to imagine a future event clearly, said Jeremy Gray, a Yale psychology professor and coauthor of the study in the September edition of the journal Psychological Science. You need "a sort of 'far-sightedness,' to put it in a single word," he said.

The problem with relying on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for self-control, of course, is that the PFC is a relatively feeble bit of brain, at least when compared to the limbic/dopaminergic inputs coming from below. Consider this clever experiment, led by Stanford professor Baba Shiv. (I've blogged about this experiment before.) Shiv was curious whether "cognitive load" could influence self-control, so he gave half of the subjects a two-digit number to memorize (low load), while the other half were given a seven-digit number (high load). Subjects were then instructed to walk to another room in the building. On the way they passed by a table at which they were presented with a choice between a caloric slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad. Fifty-nine percent of the people trying to remember seven digits (high load) chose the cake, while sixty-three percent of the two-digit subjects (low load) chose the fruit salad. In other words, having people memorize an extra five digits made them exhibit significantly less self-control.

Why did the number of digits have such a strong effect? Shiv speculates that the effort required to memorize seven numbers drew cognitive resources away from our ability to control our urges. This makes anatomical sense, since working memory and self-control are both located in our prefrontal cortex. Having to remember seven numbers occupied neurons that would otherwise help us decide what to eat, which causes us to become more reliant on our impulsive emotions. While we tend to think of self-control as being an innate trait, it is actually dependent on a range of extrinsic factors, all of which affect the way our brain responds to a given situation.

This model of limited "thinking resources" has now generated a large amount of supporting evidence. Our decisions really are swayed by the computational limits of our brain. For example, in 2003 neuroeconomists noticed that subjects on diets who resisted temptation in the morning (by foregoing the chance to grab snacks from a nearby basket) later ate significantly more ice cream in an ice-cream taste test than subjects who hadn't exercised self-control. They also quit 40 percent earlier when confronted with a difficult math problem. By resisting the morning snacks, they had temporarily "used up" their ability to resist further temptation. (Other variables that seem to exhaust our self-control are alcohol, stress, and sleep deprivation.)

The moral of this data is that we have to pick our battles. Everybody occasionally splurges on the slice of cake, or quickly gives up on a difficult problem. Instead of trying to never be bad, we should focus on being good when it matters. Your PFC gets tired rather quickly.

Read the comments on this post...Jonah Lehrer none@example.com

So two days passed and I went back to the passport office at the police station, armed with my passport stating that I was born in Italy, and two of my old Egyptian passports, my old Egyptian birth certificate and my old Lesotho birth certificate - all of which state that I was born in LESOTHO.

My father and I walk in to see the officer on duty, and explained the situation to him. The first thing he said, without looking at a sheet of paper, was “Oh well then you didn’t write in the country of birth of course.”

Um no - we did. So I said, “Why don’t you dig out the application form and we can see if we included the country?”

So they did, while my father and I waited outside. I watched my application form being taken in to the officer and then sat there and waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally we’re called in and, lo and behold, I was right.

So I stood there and watched him as he scrambled for any excuse so that they wouldn’t have to accept responsibility for their mistake.

Him: Oh but everyone knows that Roma is in Italy.

My father: No but we wrote Lesotho right there. So clearly if it says Roma, Lesotho, then the town is Roma and the country is Lesotho.

Him: No but you see once you wrote Roma, Lesotho became irrelevant. Everyone knows Roma is in Italy.

My father: No but you see, in English, the capital of Italy is spelled R-O-M-E not R-O-M-A.

Him: No but spelling is irrelevant.

No matter what we said, he had a retarded comeback, implying that whatever we said was irrelevant and that it was my mistake for being born in such an obscure country.

And he just kept coming back to how it didn’t matter that we had written Lesotho, cause we had already written Roma, and cause in my previous passport (which was issued from the same friggin office) it only said Roma -cause some lazy government employee couldn’t be bothered to write 7 extra letters.

So we basically had to go through the process of applying for my passport all over again, although they did promise to get it to us two days earlier than usual.

We should have been so lucky.

Later that afternoon the officer called my father and said “Um actually can you come and get the passport two days later than we agreed? You see, Lesotho isn’t listed in our system so it’s going to take a bit longer than we expected.”

Cause everything was done manually in the past, they’re having a really hard time dealing with these new, technologically advanced machines called COM-PEW-TERS.

So of course there was nothing we could do, but wait two more days. And then they called again, and said “Um no actually it’s going to take a bit longer cause we don’t know how to add Lesotho to the system.”

Yes. We understand. Your morons. It’s ok. We won’t hold it against you.

Today on the 22 of october 2008 @ Gitex Dubai 2008 , aproximity around 8:45AM GMT I had the honor and the pleasure to meet the Prof. Taher El-Gamal , the great Egyptian cryptographer, I don`t think I am not going to wash my right hand ever in my life !! I was soo exited so happy undiscripale feeling really. please take 5 min from your time to read his wiki pedia page to know how great he is, also try to do the next command:

read more

alaa

PARIS: Sister Emmanuelle, a nun who lived for years among scavengers in Cairo’s slums and who has been compared to Mother Teresa for her fight to defend the rights of the poor, died Monday at age 99.A spokeswoman for her association, Sandrine de Carlo, said the Belgium-born nun died in her sleep at(author unknown)

مينا جرجس

So I finally got around to renewing my passport, and I am no longer an owner of one of the big, ugly green Egyptian passports. Instead, I got myself one of those snazzy, new, small (but still ugly) green passports. So you’d think I wouldn’t have anything to complain about right? Wrong.

They got my place of birth wrong. 

According to the police station where I renewed it, I was born in Italy. (The source of confusion here was the fact that the town I was born in unfortunately has the same name as a city in Italy). According to the birth certificate they issued me last year, I was born in South Africa. And in reality, I was born in Lesotho.

Now I understand that very few people have heard of Lesotho, but did they actually look at my application form? And you’d think that a prerequisite for an employee who’s sole responsibility is issuing birth certificates would have some rudimentary knowledge of geography. Alternatively, you’d think they would have this little machine where they could punch a few buttons and pull out a person’s record and doublecheck that the information they are being told is actually correct - or is that asking too much?

Renew Diptychal’s Passport Take 2…