Yelpaze-ölümü.

The world is a terrifying place. As if spending your day attempting to not be run down by a bus only to be transformed into hundreds of quivering lumps of gore, staying away from picture windows during tornandos so that you don't magically become impaled through your torso with a pane of glass or waiting that enchanting full hour before swimming after eating a large meal weren't enough, the people who inhabit The Land of the Morning Calm posit that there exists a closer-to-home, more insidious way to perish. Namely, uh:

Leaving your fan on in your room while you are sleeping.

Called (in an example of overtly ingenious naming) "fan-death", this phenomenon is ascribed to have been the vehicle of gross mortality for, ahem, HUNDREDS of ordinary LotMC-dwellers.

"Domonic", you ask innocently from the comfort of your home, where odds are that at least one of these lethal devices now holds court, "how is it that an ordinary electric fan, an invention that has helped thousand of people survive Parisian heatwaves, Roman siroccos and pavement-baked New York afternoons that cause birds on the wing to burst into oily flame and make nuns curse openly in the street, kill you? I mean, other than if you lick the socket while it is plugged in." I would then laugh openly at your puerile naivite and shake my head, noting sadly that your infantile ignorance will inevitably cost your own sweet life. For, as dozens of LotMC physicians - frikkin' doctors, you shet-bags - have attested, leaving a fan on while you sleep can snuff you by:

1) Creating a vacuum in your room by removing the oxygen in your room, thereby suffocating you slowly until you, weary and already given to slumber, take the Big Dirt Nap.

2) Gradually lowering your body temperature until you perish, a la "Jack" in Titanic, from hypothermia and exposure. Except, um, "Corset" Kate Winslet isn't there to mourn you.

3) Dramatically increasing, in that small space, the amount of lethal carbon dioxide until you perish from poisoning.

Fancy, no? I think this bears repeating: dozens of reputable physicians in the Land of the Morning Calm feel very strongly that leaving a fan on when you are sleeping can, and will, kill you.

Now, before my good, sweet Italian name is sullied with accusation that I am an ethnocentrist, an Occidentalist or worse, I will remind my precious reading public of these key facts about myself:

* I have a Bachelor's Degree in (Socio-Cultural) Anthropology.
* I am a thesis away from a Master's Degree in Central Eurasian Studies.
* I lived on the Asian continent for five months.
* I am currently a foreign student advisor for nearly three thousand international students.
* So.
* Shet.
* The Feck.
* Ep.

***

Recently I discovered that I am, indeed, not alone in a small, personal Hell of my own making. Namely, I've discovered that someone I know ALSO lays awake at night, face burning and guts roiling, remembering how in third grade one vomited the contents of one's stomach (Campbell's Chicken Noodle Petrochemical Substance) in the middle of the floor of the classroom and discovering, to one's horror, that one the noodles was to be found elping out one's nostrils like a moray eel peeking out from a reefy hiding spot. In front of EVERY-FECKING-ONE. Or something like that. Yeah. That never happened to me. No-siree-Bob.

*humming*

Anyway, I've found a psychological trick to help me get rid of the memory once and for all while providing myself intense amusement. It's called

the retroactive Uzi

and I encourage you all to try it.

How this works is simplictity itself: Let's say that you are finding yourself in the grips of a memory so shameful that you are wondering if you deserve the wicked life you now lead. What you do is you envision, at the most hideously embarassing moment of the memory (the part where you pee on yourself, for example), YOURSELF, as you are now, bursting into the room with an Israeli-issued Uzi. Then, your present self sets forth to mow down the old self in a hail of molten lead and, finding the work done, departs. Nobody else is even wounded, but they all - all of your "friends" who sniggered and pointed and whispered behind your back - rush to your aid and snotnose-weep for your safety. You make a miraculous recovery, but not before all of the people who witnessed your shameful deed have fully erased the memory of it from their minds. You see, it's not that it's awful to carry these secret shames around yourself, but the thought that someone, somewhere, remembers the time you shat your pants in the New York Museum of Natural History on a field trip that makes you want to chew a revolver. Now you won't have to.

You're welcome.

(This portion of the blog is dedicated to yengeyim K.C., who laughed at this idea last week despite the fact that, deep down, I know she lies awake at night for a different reason now.)

Until next time,

Domonic (amIaproductofpoorgenetics?) Potorti