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As noted in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal

Hasselhoff: a patient who turns up in the ER with an injury with a bizarre explanation. Inspired by the Baywatch star’s freak injury suffered in a London hotel last year. He reportedly hit his head on a chandelier while shaving and cut his arm.

Jack Bauer: a doctor who is still up and working after 24 hours on the job.

Mini-Me: a trainee or medical student who emulates their senior colleagues too much but doesn’t say a lot.

Agnostication: usually vain attempt to answer the question, “How long have I got, Doc?”

Hasselhoff heads new wave of medical slang in The Guardian. 

1. How was your year?
(a) Spectacular! Best year of my life.
(b) I had a good year, despite a few rough patches which I  got over quickly enough.
(c) This year the good times and the bad times cancelled each other out, so I guess I break even.
(d) It had its moments, but in general it was blah/miserable.
(e) 2007 was so horrible, I’m thinking of faking my own death, moving to another place, and starting over under a new identity.

From Popbitch: Philippines Celebrity Big Brother even has problems.  Five CBB stars danced with the famous Cebu provincial jail inmates, but TV bosses have so far withheld  the promised payments to the orange suited prisoners.

Time for the annual round-up. I’ve asked several readers to name their five favorite books of the year. Go ahead and post your own list.
Tina Cuyugan, an imperialist running dog and political incorrectness guru.
All these writers underwent a form of incarceration/isolation—sometimes self-imposed,
sometimes not. It did something to their writing.

MY NAME IS RED, a novel by Orhan Pamuk (2001). This murder mystery/romance set in the paranoid world of Ottoman miniaturist painters is narrated in bits by a dog, a painted horse, and the murder victim himself, among others. Once you get past the jaw-tightening suspense—anyone can be garroted by order of the Sultan at a moment’s notice, for one thing—the novel reveals itself as an elegant disquisition on art, religion and perception. Pamuk dropped out of college and hunkered down in his mom’s Istanbul flat for a decade, just scribbling away and completing… nothing much. A quarter-century later, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Hermit-geeks of the world, take heart.

MEMOIRS FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a fictionalized memoir by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1862). Just as he was about to be executed at age 28 for the subversive act of owning a printing press, Dostoyevsky was sentenced instead to four years’ hard labor in remotest Siberia, recounted in this book. Don’t put off reading it out of fear of Russian histrionics; it’s his most detached work, with finely observed characters and set pieces. Even filthy and fettered, with half their heads shaved (don’t ask why only half; they just do things differently in Russia), the prisoners are vividly individualistic, boastful, class-conscious and status-obsessed. For nausea value, you can’t beat his description of donning a never-washed hospital dressing gown previously worn by many diseased and tortured prisoners. Wonderful Christmas reading. All that snow.

THE CAMOMILE LAWN, a novel by Mary Wesley (1984). As a London debutante and as an aristocrat’s wife, Wesley had many lovers (so numerous, she would in later years count them like sheep, to lull herself to sleep). She then met and married the love of her life. When he died she was devastated. For 10 years she struggled to write, destitute and living in an isolated cottage. Her first novel, published at age 70, launched her as a literary sensation, a startlingly fresh voice cheerfully recounting tales of illicit passion, incest, twins, threesomes, and other permutations. The Camomile Lawn captures the world of a group of young cousins just before and during WWII, and the complications (sexual and otherwise) that draw them together and apart over decades. Wesley is a master of tight dialogue. Little old ladies rule.

ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN, short fiction by Edward P. Jones (2006). As the son of an illiterate hotel maid, Jones had a weirdly nomadic upbringing in just one city, Washington, D.C. He worked for almost 20 years as the news writer of Tax Notes, a trade journal for accountants. For sheer ennui, this probably beats a jail stint in Siberia. But a marvelous blossoming was taking place in Jones’ imagination, and at 52—he’d just been fired from Tax Notes—he wrote The Known World, his first novel, about a freed slave who
himself owns slaves. It’s a deeply humane novel, of a sadness beyond sadness. His stories are just as richly textured, carrying the reader forward and backward in time, and in and out of the minds and hearts of Washingtonians never seen on CNN. The man seems
incapable of writing a cheap line.

LOVE IN A FALLEN CITY, short fiction by Eileen Chang (1943). After her chic flapper mom fled to Europe, Chang grew up the household of her opium-addicted, concubine-fondling father, who literally locked her up for six months (and denied her medical treatment for dysentery), for being “disrespectful.” Her stories of entrapment, manipulation and doomed attempts to escape are recounted in a cool, calm voice, very precise. Don’t be fooled by the references to flowers and glimpses of Shanghai glamour. Chang’s world is Darwinian at its core, especially when prospective lovers and family members are involved. The terrifying black quarry seen at the end of Ang Lee’s film
adaptation of “Lust, Caution” lies ahead for us all.

Butch Perez, film director. Five “entertainments”, in the order I read them:

THE EAGLE’S THRONE by Carlos Fuentes
BANGKOK HAUNTS by John Burdett
THE ECHO MAKER by Richard Powers
THE THEORY OF CLOUDS by Stéphane Audeguy
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolaño

Budjette Tan, advertising creative director by day, aspiring superhero by night. My top 5 graphic novels for 2007 (more like Top 5 comic books I read the past year and highly recommend – in no particular order)

1. ALL-STAR SUPERMAN by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. After a very long while, here’s a Superman title that anyone can pick up and enjoy and not have to worry about decades of continuity history. It’s just a whole lot of wild, weird, wacko stories that only Morrison and Quitely can deliver.
2. BATMAN DETECTIVE by Paul Dini. Dini delivers one-shot/self-contained mysteries. Each issue is drawn by a different artist, each issue puts Batman’s deductive skills to the test and reminds us why he is called the Dark Knight Detective.
3. FELL: FERAL CITY by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Detective Richard Fell is assigned to Snow Town, a city with just two and half detectives. No costumed crime fighters in this comic book, by the killers and murders in Snow Town would definitely make the Joker feel right at home.
4. THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja. Billionaire + kung-fu artist + crime fighter = a very kick-ass updated version of that 1970s Marvel
character.
5. ELMER by Gerry Alanguilan. Chickens all over the world, have started to talk and
nobody knows why. Now, humans have to put up with these intelligent fowl (or is it the other way around?)

Jaime Augusto Zobel, corporate overlord, publisher of Flip, Bruce Wayne?

– DIVISADERO by Michael Ondaatje
(Novel has two parts and much discussion on which is better. The first part, which involves sibling relationships in rural California and a tragic event that changes their lives, is haunting and eloquent).
– BLUE AFTERNOON by William Boyd
(Set in turn of the century Manila! Brief literary glimpse into the period of American occupation with some interesting side stories that include a, supposedly, real Filipino inventor. Well written.)
– DEPTHS by Henning Mankell
(WW1 Naval Commanders, obsessive protagonist with a strange emotional void. Told in a sparse, unsettling way. Very desolate, cold and slightly depressing. Still, quite engaging).
– THE GHOST by Robert Harris
(Thriller with a fictional take on a Former British Prime Minister who starts to write his memoirs. The protagonist is the spitting image of Tony Blair. Entertaining and intelligent)
– THE UNCOMMON READER by Alan Bennett
(Queen Elizabeth starts to read from a mobile library—fun!)
Honorable Mention!
– THE RELIGION by Tim Willocks
(No great literary work as it reads more like a movie script. Turkish Siege of Malta in the early 1500s. Not for those with a weak stomach but for those who like the world of graphic novels, this makes for interesting reading. I will be in the minority…but I liked it. First part of a Trilogy).

In which we do the opposite of our annual rants about evil cabbies growing horns during the holiday season, and document encounters with Nice taxi drivers. (But if you meet some orcs driving taxis, post your story anyway.)

All my usual sources of kitty litter had run out of stock, so I had to go to the pet shop on Jupiter. I was standing on the side of the road, hailing cabs at noon, six days before Xmas. Traffic was heavy, all the taxis were taken, and one driver pretended I was invisible. Then a guy walked up to me and said his taxi was in the gas station across the street if I needed one. A strange and wondrous occurrence in the middle of Xmas chaos. And the name of the taxi was Versailes (with one L).

Guga in airports, originally uploaded by Koosama.

19 May 2006. It’s midnight, and seven hours before boarding. I am hanging out in an empty airport in Trieste, which used to be the port of the Austro-Hungarian empire, then part of Yugoslavia, and is now the tip of Italy. It is not Hong Kong airport, that’s for sure. The snack bar is a vending machine, and there is no Louis Vuitton store.

There’s one other passenger camping out at the airport. Indian, I think—he walked up to me and asked if I was Indian, I said no, and we never spoke again. By silent agreement we’ve divided the place in two—he stays in the arrivals area and I in the departures. I’ve stretched out on a metal bench in front of the police station, surely the safest spot in the airport—unless the cops themselves have a showdown. I can hear them having a loud, possibly violent argument inside their office. The bench isn’t too bad and my stuffed toy leopard Guga makes a good pillow, but the metal is cold even if I have on three layers of clothes. I sleep a total of 30 minutes in four hours. The rest of the time I read The Stones of Florence and check my watch. I’m not scared or lonely, though I feel like a homeless person living in a terminal. At 5 am all the lights come on and the staff begin to arrive. I check my suitcase, then have a coffee at the bar. The hardest part is not losing consciousness while waiting for the 7.10 flight to Rome. The moment I strap myself onto the seat I’m asleep.