Pop Pop Pop, Watchin' Motha Fuckas Drop!

At lunch I ordered 'steak frites' but the smell of the burnt man would not leave my sinuses.  The steak tasted like a Marseille BBQ!  I filled up on fries.

On the way to the autopsy room the professor started talking about how the man we were going see was a known drug dealer, and that we shouldn't feel too bad for him.  It's not like he was a innocent caught in the cross-fire.  We should think of it as a "work accident" (accident de travail).

Let me tell you, an AK will fuck your shit up.  The guy was hit maybe 10 times in the chest and head.  There was hardly any of his brain left.  The ever-hilarious chain-smoking doctor opened up the cranium for all to see the paltry remains and said "See the size of an average gangster's brain?  100 grams!"  (An average human brain is 1300 grams.)

We got to take a more active role in this autopsy, helping carry stuff and getting to fiddle with his innards.  The doctor urged me to pick up an arm to see how hard it is to move a stiff.  I did, and the corpse grabbed me!  I didn't shriek like a little girl, but almost.  I moved the wrist in such a way that the tendons naturally caused the hand to grip me.

I also handled and examined his heart, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, and spleen.

They very carefully examined each entrance and exit wound to determine how many bullets hit him.  They longly debated whether or not a bullet had shattered midway causing two exit wounds.  They smoked and debated some more.  Voices were raised, sarcastic volleys followed.  There was an uneasy balance between the fact that it was pretty obvious what happened here (he was a drug dealer whose head was shot to hell by other drug dealers and that's how he died, duh) and the fact that for legal purposes they needed to be fairly precise.

On the train ride home I probably passed within a few hundred meters of the site of the shooting, near St. Joseph.  Quite an odd feeling stopping at St. Joseph and seeing all the housing projects and all the poor people who inhabit them.  I don't know if I would have ended up any differently than the guy whose spleen I played with if I lived there.  Precisely 24 hours ago, he was probably driving around like everyone else, alive.  I'm sure he was ignorant, and brutish and whatever else you want, but I cannot feel better or worse about his death than that of the 70 year old woman who died of complications in the hospital.

I've seen some shit

This morning I finally had the famous autopsy experience everyone has been talking about since September. After so much time wondering what it would look like, smell like, feel like, I now have the answers!  After a brief tour of the facilities, us four students and the professor donned our smocks and shoe covers and entered the autopsy room.  It's a modest space with plenty of sunlight, with two stainless steel autopsy tables on either side of the room.  There was an elderly woman on the table to the right, and a black body bag on the left.  A few gendarmes were hanging out in the observation area, because the guy in the body bag is the result of a criminal affair.  Then before I could really get my bearings the room burst into activity, with two teams of five starting to work on both cadavres.

The first shock was when they opened the body bag.  The guy was almost entirely carbonized.  He was a victim of a barbecue marseillais - he was killed execution-style with a handgun, then placed in a car, doused in petrol, and set ablaze in order to obfuscate any evidence.  It smelled like, well, burnt meat! As they started slicing him up his flesh really looked like a well cooked steak.  The chain-smoking head doctor was compelled to cry out, "Regardez!  Il est à point!" (Roughly 'Look!  He's cooked to perfection!').  The ambiance was anything but somber.  They do this day in and day out. 

On the other side of the room the autopsy proceeded more normally, with the systematic removal and inspection of all the major organs.  First the brain was extracted, which was one of the smellier operations, not because the brain smelled, but because the friction from cutting bone with a small circular saw caused a burning odor.  Otherwise the room did not stink.  The old lady had died only an hour or two earlier, and was therefore 'fresh' and the barbecue guy just smelled like left-over steak.  Once they removed the bowels though, everyone caught a good whiff of dead people poop.

At the end, a friendly, overtly gay technician was left alone to whistle and sew up the old woman to make her more or less presentable for her funeral. He took good care to keep her hair in order.

This afternoon we're going to see the autopsy of a guy who was driving along last night (not far from my school) when another car pulled up and blasted him with a Kalachnikov.  I'm 'lucky' since gang related killings have been relatively infrequent lately.  There have been about a dozen since the beginning of the year, and I get to see two in one week!

I hope I am

Recently I've been having this recurring feeling that I might be somehow mentally deficient, and that everyone around me is just humoring me. I say it's a feeling because I really feel it in my bones when it happens - it's almost spine-tingling as I entertain is as a real possibility. I could be an idiot after all. Idiots rarely recognise themselves as such.

A Report on Idiots in Massachusetts (1848)

Sphexishness

My daily trip to class

Phase One : The car

Phase Two : The Train

Phase Three : The Subway

There are only two subway lines in Marseille, and I've only ever had use for Line One. All the cars are 70s-style brown and orange.

Destination : Crash Test Lab

Well I've been to one world fair, a picnic and a rodeo and that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard come over a set of ear-phones!

- Major T.J. "King" Kong

Two thoughts

I still often feel that when I am read something I'm getting some privileged peek into some better world, a Great Gatsby-like dinner party filled with bon mots and subtle references. It's usually by reading something that the possibility of some higher good overcoming the injustice in the world brings a smile to my face. Reading can be transcendant like that. But then the writer might stumble and snap me into realizing the terrestrial baseness of what they're selling.

As I was driving in dense rush-hour traffic today, I fixed my eyes longly on the middle-aged faces of all the lawyers and doctors and what-haveyous slowly inching past me. A question screamed out: what are you people doing?

Randomosity

I've taken at least 3 different statistics courses, and I feel like I'm only now internalizing the core concepts. The course I took a month ago was key, because the prof started from the very beginning, and was very, very thorough. He explained a few things that I'm sure I learned many times before, but are often glazed over (I guess because they're deemed too simple to dwell on). Yet if these key ideas fly out of your head for even a moment, the whole enterprise starts to seem spooky and incomprehensible. One of these ideas is what I'm going to call randomosity. How random is randomosity? Well, not at all.

Statistics is simply math applied to the real world. But the real world is incredibly complicated, so complicated that it often seems like chaos - completely random. But what seems random isn't always really random! The key is discerning the random from the non-random.

This is possible because pure chance is possible to calculate with absolute accuracy (a funny thought eh?). On the other hand, natural phenomena with non-random causes and effects have so many variables and are so complex that even our most powerful models are only approximations. Chance, on the other hand, is known. The chance of flipping heads is always the same - exactly 50%. With a die you have exactly 1 in 6 chances of rolling a given number. Not sort of. Exactly. (Sorry lotto players.)

We're comparing what would happen under random circumstances to what we have actually observed, and then seeing to what extent they differ. This is the guiding principle of many statistical tests.

This site is pretty easy to understand: http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/