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Author: The Grey Literature
This is the personal blog of Benjamin Gregory Carlisle PhD.
Queer; Academic; Queer academic.
"I'm the research fairy, here to make your academic problems disappear!"
I make it no secret that I have a hard time understanding the lyrics to most music. Usually, Christmas music is an exception. Christmas songs are the same, year after year. Even more helpful, if you’re in a choir or if you attend church, often the lyrics of Christmas songs are printed out and handed to you so you can sing along. Even with all that help, though, Walking in a Winter Wonderland is a song that took me a long time to figure out.
One part of the song goes as follows:
In the meadow, we can build a snowman
And pretend that he is Parson Brown
He’ll say, “Are you married?”
We’ll say “No man!
“But you can do the job when you’re in town”
As a child, I thought “Parson” was some guy’s first name. I figured he was some famous person I hadn’t heard of in other contexts. Clearly I didn’t think about it too hard.
But if you don’t realise that “Parson” means “member of the clergy” and “do the job” means “officiate your wedding,” you might think that the singers of this song were a bunch of floosies, and that they had another “job” in mind for him to “do” while he was in town.
Next time you have the chance, ask a Québécois(e) to tell you the name of the popular game pictured to the left in this post.
In English, we call it “foosball.”
In French it’s called “baby-foot.” I’m not saying that a literal translation of the French term for “foosball” would be “baby-foot”—the French don’t call it “pied de bébé.” The French say the English words “baby-foot” as their word for “foosball.”
I’m not sure why I expected the French word for “foosball” to make sense. The English word is confusing to me as well.
Every once in a while I have an idea for something that I think would be fun on a t-shirt or on your iPhone wallpaper. This one is not original. It’s something of a running joke in my family.
A few years ago, listening to CBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, my older sister asked, “What’s the luge?”
She had never heard of it before.
Not missing a beat, my mother answered her, “It’s when you don’t winge!”
My sister was not impressed. As far as I know, she still hates that joke. My mother, on the other hand, thinks it’s hysterical, and she will explain in detail why it is such a good joke to you if you don’t laugh the first time you hear it.
I like graduation ceremonies. Don’t get me wrong—hearing the names of a couple hundred students read in order of academic programme isn’t my idea of a wild party, but I’m glad such things exist. There’s a couple things that I like about graduations.
Convocation is the ultimate example of backward compatibility. There’s something positively medieval about them. As the Principal said, the tradition of graduation ceremonies at McGill predates Canadian Confederation. If a person from even ten centuries ago was magically transported to Place-des-Arts on the morning of November 23rd, 2011, that person would probably be able to recognise what is going on, just by seeing all these acamedics in their robes and the giving of certificates.
When I graduated from Western, the procession of professors, chancellors, etc was preceded by a guy carrying a big gold mace. Maces are symbols of power, and historically speaking, they were there to serve the purpose of keeping everyone in line, in case the meeting got out of hand. And at some point in history, someone thought, “Carrying around an implement for bludgeoning rabble-rousers is something that we have to keep doing forever. Just in case.”
When I got the actual paper with my degree printed on it, I discovered that it was all written in Latin. According to the paper, I have a “Magistrum Artium” now. I’m going to take a picture of my degree and get my little sister (whose Latin is much better than mine) to read it at Christmas break.
At McGill by tradition, undergrads are tapped on the head by an academic cap as they graduate. Grad students used to have their hands shaken by the Chancellor, however in the wake of the Swine Flu scare, hand-shaking fell out of fashion. (Not based on any evidence, mind you—Swine Flu is not transmitted by hand-to-hand contact.) Hence, the Chancellor hits graduate students with a tube as they pass him on the stage.
That was the weirdest thing. It was like a knighting (“I dub thee “Magistrum Artium”) except it would have been a whole lot awesomer if they had tapped me on the shoulder with the sword of Gryffindor or something. Actually, I’d settle for the sword of James McGill.
Academic regalia
What’s also fun (but expensive) is the academic regalia. This time, they let me keep the hat, at least!
I can wear it whenever I want to look smart and make people pay attention to my ideas.
Every programme/faculty/level of achievement has a different robe/hood/hat that they wear to graduate. For a MA at McGill, you get a black robe with funny sleeves that you can’t actually put your arms through, a mortar board and a baby blue hood that goes around the neck. In the attached photo, I’m trying to show what the hood looks like a bit. That’s the interesting part.
Not only do the students all wear different things, but because each professor wears the academic regalia of the school where she earned her PhD (not the school she works at), many professors will have different robes/hoods/hats. Some are boring, some are very eye-catching. The profs who did their PhD at McGill all have funny black McGill hats.
Framing my degree
I looked at the prices of the fancy “McGill” frames that were for sale just outside the theatre and asked them how much they cost. They said they were $200 apiece.
When I stopped laughing, I realised that they were serious and moved on.
Part of me wants to go out and find a “Dora the Explorer” frame for my degree. Something really tacky to keep it in, at least while I’m looking for a frame that won’t require another student loan for me to buy. The only problem with that is that if I do that as a joke while I’m looking for the “real frame,” it might become the “real frame.”
There were quite a few highlights for my time as a beater on the McGill team. I feel like our beaters really started to come together as a team this weekend. We had a rough start in our first game, and we were eliminated after we made it into the top 16 (the IQA hasn’t released final rankings yet) but I’m proud of my team and our performance at the World Cup.
I think my favourite game was against “America’s Finest Quidditch Club.” As far as I understand it, by their own admission, “America’s Finest” was formed out of the desire of a number of jocks to beat up Harry Potter nerds.
Brooms up!
Partly because of their loose grasp of the rules of the game, America’s Finest played a very dirty game. I will not enumerate all the ways I saw them break the rules, but I will tell you that in the end justice was served: we won. We played a clean game and we still beat them.
Je suis le vif d’or
Being a golden snitch at the World Cup was a long-term dream of mine, one that I realised this weekend past at the Quidditch World Cup V in New York City. I had so much fun!
On the first morning, Alex Benepe himself shook my hand and called me “Wings,” on account of the wings on my headband.
Throughout the day, I was interviewed and had my picture taken by different magazines, websites, radio stations, etc. But even more fun than that was when little kids would ask to have their photo taken with me. They were so cute. (“And what house are you in, little boy? … Griffindor? Wow!”)
It was a very busy weekend. On the Saturday alone, I was officially a part of seven different games—three as a snitch and four as a beater. (As a snitch on my way back to my field, I interfered with quite a few other games unofficially!)
A couple weird things to think about: Because of all those photos I took with those kids, I am in quite a number of people’s Facebook albums as the Golden Snitch now, I’m sure, and I will never be tagged, because those people don’t know me. Also, a surprisingly large number of photos were taken of my rear end.
Good news and bad news
Speaking of my hindquarters, my performance as a snitch at the Canada Cup was recently featured on RelieFtv, a TV station in Ottawa. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the footage they have of me is mainly of me being pantsed by the University of Ottawa seeker.
I am in the process of writing a post on the 2011 Quidditch World Cup, but I’m too tired to finish it right now, and I haven’t even gone through the photos yet.
So in the meantime, here’s something I pulled out of the file on my computer marked “not quite ready for public consumption.”
“Movember” is the name of a movement that emphasises men’s health, specifically prostate cancer awareness during the month of November, by encouraging men to grow moustaches. There are two main reasons why I will be clean-shaven this November.
Screening for prostate cancer
When is it rational to be screened for a condition?
The first major problem I have with Movember is the emphasis that is placed on prostate cancer screening for men—even men who are not in a high risk group for this type of cancer.
Not every test is completely reliable. Think about it this way: If you put a toothpick into something you baked and it comes out dry, it’s likely that your baking is done. But it’s also possible that you just poked the wrong part of your banana bread, and the rest of it is all gooey. If that happens, it’s called a “false positive” result for your test, or a “Type I error.”
This isn’t just a problem for bakers. It’s a problem with pretty much all medical tests (or any test at all for that matter) that there is a non-zero chance that you will get a false positive (“Type I error”) or a false negative (“Type II error”) result.
For prostate cancer, there are two methods of screening: a digital rectal exam (DRE) or a prostate-specific antigen test (PSA). The DRE is a physical examination of your rectum by palpation and the PSA is a chemical assay performed on a blood draw. Neither of these tests can be relied upon to give perfectly accurate results all the time.
The problem is that if a doctor finds what he takes to be evidence of a tumour growth in the prostate, he may order a biopsy of the prostate. This is an invasive, expensive, painful (and in the case of Type I errors, unnecessary) procedure that brings its own set of medical risks. A biopsy carries the risk of infection, for example.
Please examine the decision tree I have attached to this post. I have tried to make it as general as possible. If you wanted to be really rigorous, you would assign dollar values to each of the outcomes, and then for each of the branches off a probability node (a circle), calculate the probability of that branch. Then if you multiply the probability value of that branch and the dollar value of the outcome for that branch, and take the sum of all the branches, it will give you the value of that node. Repeat the process from right to left, until you come to a decision node (a square). The branch that carries the highest value as calculated using the algorithm I outlined is the decision that one has most reason to take.
I haven’t done the research to find out what the rates of Type I and II errors are for PSA tests, but they are pretty high, and you can see that if the probability of an inaccurate test result is high enough, and the consequences for having a bad test result are dire enough, that might give you reason to go without testing, provided you aren’t in a high risk group for prostate cancer. Further, a randomised control trial of men showed that there is no significant difference in mortality between a group of men who were screened for prostate cancer and those who weren’t. The evidence shows that prostate cancer screening doesn’t help reduce mortality.
If you are in a high risk group, like if there is a history of it in your family, and you are in a certain age range, then by all means, you should be tested for prostate cancer regularly—but don’t start encouraging young healthy men who are not at high risk for developing this sort of cancer to go looking for it. They may find more trouble than is actually there.
Emphasis on men’s health
The second major problem I have with Movember is their condescending and naive position on “men’s health” generally. Let’s consider a quote from the Movember Canada website:
Let’s face it – men are known to be a little more indifferent towards their health … The reasons for the poor state of men’s health in the Canada and around the world are numerous and complex and this is primarily due to a lack of awareness of the health issues men face. This can largely be attributed to the reluctance of men to openly discuss the subject, the old ‘it’ll be alright’ attitude. Men are less likely to schedule doctors’ appointments when they feel ill or to go for an annual physical, thereby denying them the chance of early detection and effective treatment of common diseases.
Movember Canada is stating here that it is “reluctance of men,” an “‘it’ll be all right’ attitude” and the general indifference toward issues of health that make men less likely to schedule a doctor’s appointment when they feel ill, or to make an appointment for a regular physical exam.
This is not the case. In Canada, men don’t schedule doctor’s appointments largely because they don’t have a doctor that they can call to make an appointment. I have been on my CLSC’s waiting list for a doctor for over a year now, and unless I go to the hospital or a walk-in clinic, I think it unlikely that I will see a doctor any time soon. This is not because I’m indifferent toward my health. This is because I don’t have a doctor.
It is not men being “too macho for doctors” that’s the problem. It’s that we as a country have made decisions regarding health care in Canada based on economics and politics that have brought about a doctor shortage. I hesitate to call it a “doctor shortage,” because the word “shortage” makes it sound like it was something unavoidable or unforeseeable—not something that was engineered and implemented as a matter of public policy.
The reason men aren’t seeing doctors in Canada is because we have chosen to limit our health care spending by decreasing the number of doctors in Canada who will order expensive tests and procedures. So don’t you dare turn around and chide men for failing to see a doctor regularly, when that is exactly what we have decided we want.
This Saturday was an exciting one for me and my teammates. I woke up at 5h15 to leave for Ottawa from the McGill campus by 5h45. It was the day of the first-ever Canada Cup, and I was on the starting lineup for McGill’s quidditch team as a beater.
We did very well on Saturday. You can check out the stats for McGill’s showing at the Canada Cup, which are posted on the IQA website, but here’s the highlights:
McGill won the Canada Cup
McGill was undefeated at the Canada Cup
McGill suffered no hospitalisations at the Canada Cup
McGill even provided half the snitches for the Canada Cup
That last point is a matter of some importance, actually. I believe there were six snitches at the Canada Cup, and three of those were McGill students. Because there were so few snitches, this meant that (contrary to tradition) a snitch from McGill had to snitch a game in which McGill was playing. Fortunately (?) in both cases where that happened, McGill didn’t catch the snitch, but the game was a blow-out, in that McGill had an advantage of greater than 30 points (the value of a snitch-catch) by the time the snitch was caught. I say fortunately, because it means that there’s no way that there could be accusations of favouritism on the part of the snitch.
I was a snitch at the first Canada Cup
Je suis le vif d'or
On Saturday, I realised a long-time dream of mine: I was the golden snitch for an actual competitive game between schools! I got to snitch two games, in fact. For the rest of the time I was busy beating for McGill. I had so much fun.
I did make a mistake in my first game, though: Minutes before the game, I asked someone where the nearest bathroom was (because I had to go to the bathroom). This was a mistake because I did so within earshot of the seeker.
Less than five minutes in, both seekers had me cornered in a bathroom, but fortunately they knocked me down when they forced the bathroom door open, and so I got a few seconds to run off. I lost them, hid, and came back to the field right on time.
I am the golden snitch
The second game that I snitched went much better. I colluded with the snitch from the other game at the time, and we both got in the car that we drove up from Montréal that morning and locked the doors. We took the car right up beside the quidditch pitch, and I leaned out the window and waved while he honked the horn. We waited for a minute while one more snitch jumped into the back of the car, then drove off into the sunset with the seekers sadly running after us.
The crowd loved it.
Eventually, after we lost them, we drove around campus for 7–8 minutes and then came back to the same parking lot where we started and got out and ran back onto the field.
For this game, the seekers were little people! I felt bad for them whenever I would knock them down or steal their brooms or headbands.
At first, the seeker from Ryerson caught me. Ryerson was so happy—their team had never won a quidditch match before! Alas, the snitch-catch tied the game and it went into sudden-death overtime. That means that game time is extended until a second snitch-catch, and the snitch doesn’t leave the field. U of T caught me the second time around, and they won.
Different personalities
I’ve started noticing that I take on different personalities while playing quidditch, depending on what position I’m playing at the time. When I’m a snitch, I’m mischievous and playful. You can tell, because of the headband-with-wings that I wear.
On the other hand, when I’m beating, I am very aggressive. I yell a lot and I pretend to be very upset about everything.
“Drop it!”
“You’re gone!”
“You’re hit!”
“Get off your broom!”
That sort of thing. Also, when people break the rules, I yell at them too. That way, the other player has a harder time doing the “Oh I didn’t know I was hit!” thing.
Also, sometimes the other player is honestly ignorant of a rule—I screamed my head off at a player who tried to continue to play, having fallen off his broom. I also yelled at a guy who tackled me from the back.
Yelling is one of my favourite parts of quidditch. I love pretending to be really upset about stuff. I try to make it really over-the-top so people realise I’m not actually angry, but sometimes other players don’t get it. I made another beater really angry on Saturday. Oops!
I’m normally a pretty even-keeled person in the rest of my life. I guess quidditch is where I get all my aggression out. :P
