This is interesting

Antarctic mountain mystery solved

The mystery of how a subglacial mountain range the size of the Alps formed up to 250 million years ago has finally been solved, scientists said on Wednesday, which could help map the effects of climate change.

The Gamburtsev subglacial mountains are buried 3km below the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest remaining body of ice on the planet.

Experts are trying to learn more about the frozen continent as even a small thaw could swamp low-lying coastal areas and cities. Antarctica contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by about 57m if it ever all melted.

Here is that video I mentioned that I could not find

Thanks to YKWIA, who found it for me, and sent it so I could post it here.


That year we played the 'Beyond the Mountains of Madness' campaign in the game I got quite sick of pemmican, and I've never even tasted it. I'm with the Lieutenant.

But you must admit, it is very British.

An interesting find

Plane left on Antarctica in 1912 is found: Continent's first aircraft was turned into a motorized sled

You know, having been dealing with such cold temperatures lately, I both admire those who adventure at the poles and think they are totally barmy (although at least it's summer in Antarctica at the moment, making it 1) easier to find a metal plane and 2) helps keep people moving in such a rich and fascinating enviroment).

Yay, woman power!

7 women reach South Pole after 562-mile trek: The team from around the world skied six to 10 hours a day

Skiing six to 10 hours a day, the Commonwealth Women's Antarctic Expedition trekked an average of 15 miles a day, each hauling a 176-pound sled of provisions and shelter to reach the United States-operated Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station science base.

The expedition comprised women from Brunei, Cyprus, Ghana, India, New Zealand, Singapore and Britain.

Frostbite blackened the fingers of one of the original team of eight, Kim-Marie Spence, from Kingston, Jamaica, just three days into the journey which began Nov. 23, forcing her to leave the expedition.

Remarkable.

:)

Sad, but a life well lived

Doctor in gripping South Pole rescue dies: Trapped by weather, she treated her own breast cancer

'More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive,' she wrote in an e-mail to her parents in June, 1999 from the South Pole.

Nielsen FitzGerald never lost her adventurous spirit and even returned to desolate Antarctica several more times.

'She had incredible zest and enthusiasm for life,' said her husband, whom she first met 23 years ago when they were both on vacation in the Amazon. 'She was kindest soul I ever met, she was intelligent, with a great sense of humor, and she lived each day to the fullest.'

I am so sorry to hear of the loss of this intrepid woman. My sympathies to her family and other loved ones.

I found an interesting blog

called Voyages Extraordinaires. Here is their description:

Voyages Extraordinaires is a weblog for people of intelligence and good breeding who enjoy Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and Retro-Futurism, Victoriana and Neo-Victorianism, Voyages Extraordinaires and Imperialist Romances, Gothic Horror, Pulp Fiction, the Golden Ages of Hollywood and of Travel, silent and early films, points suprêmes and real life adventures into places exotic and historic.

That website also led me to the Guild of Scientific Troubadours, Frankensteinia: the Frankenstein Blog, and Curious Expeditions. All piqued my interest.

I've been expanding my news reader subscriptions beyond library/tech/news to include history, primary sources in European history, and Latin language (I'm rusty in my Latin; I found a podcast series of readings of Latin lessons from a public domain book).

Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the last hour or so; checking up on my reader and finding new subscriptions. I liked the Voyages Extraordinaires blog so much I'm 'following' it through Blogger's system.

Now I'm going to go to bed. I have to get up early to work on game notes and then I'm looking at possibly a 12-hour workday, since no one was scheduled as a second person for tomorrow night and our truck was delayed to Saturday. I'm going in tomorrow at 10 am. I was supposed to leave at 6 pm, but I said I'd stay as long as I could. Depending on how I feel, that might be as late as 10 pm. Then there's grocery shopping of doom to do, followed by more work on notes. Sunday morning will come early, and then the game (yay!) I don't know if I mentioned that we started back up last weekend after a hiatus for remodelling, but we did. I really enjoyed being back together and the campaign continues. My character is badly hurt and I don't know if I'll be able to continue the adventure per se. I'm a little low on characters now. One is on maternity leave with a month-old baby, one is in the belly of Yog Sothoth (don't ask how that happened--it was sheer stupidity), one is away at training, and the rest are in a bubble reality technically not on earth, unable to leave without great danger. My last character created before the one on this mission sacrificed himself to save the world on the Antarctica campaign. Whew!

Speaking of Antarctica, did you see that an ice shelf is about to break away from Antarctica? There's a nice time-elapsed slideshow in that article.

In the slightly-Cthulhoid-or-at-least-vampiric-sci-fi/horror-medicine category, there's also something I came across in the general news, but it was also commented upon by the Guild of Scientific Troubadours. A biotech team in Canada have created a yeast-powered fuel cell that feeds on human blood. Now, the thing is, it was a story that 'broke' on April 1st, and one of the researchers is named Chin-Pang-Billy Siu, which seemed a bit improbable (no offence meant), but the story is apparently legit. This could help power implants in humans eventually.

Speaking of implants, there is also an interesting story regarding a telescopic eye implant the size of a pencil eraser that can help people with macular degeneration see. (Thanks to ScuttleMonkey on Slashdot for the link.)

That's impressive

Bacon, butter fuel fastest South Pole trek: Adventurers set new record by completing 700-mile expedition in 33 days

The three Canadians broke a record set by an American just last month. One of the explorers said that he really, really wants some pizza. He had previously done a run across 4,300 miles of the Sahara. They didn't use dogs, apparently, but pulled 170-pound sleds with one man going along on snowshoes as the other two skied, sometimes through whiteouts and temps as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Congratulations, I believe, are in order.

Strange fact of the day

From my Useless Knowledge gadget for iGoogle:

The female Adelie penguin, desperate to obtain the stones she uses to build her nest, visits the nest of a bachelor Adelie, goes through the entire courtship routine, and mates with him. But once the two have had sex, the female collects the stones she came for as a sort of payment, and waddles back home to her actual mate, who’s been keeping the nest nice and warm for her return! She then stays with him for the rest of her life. Sometimes, especially cunning females engage in the courtship ritual, minus the mating part, grab the rocks, and dash home. Luckily, the males of this species, unlike humans, do not seem to bear a grudge.

Adelie Penguin Photo © Samuel Blanc, licensed under Creative Commons

Today's 'Slice of History' mentions an ill-fated Antarctic expedition

On November 12, 1912 the bodies of Robert Falcon Scott and two of his fellow expedition members were found by a search party, eight months after their death in a blizzard as they returned from the remarkable feat of reaching the South Pole, although they were the second team--the first having been Norwegian Roald Amundsen's, who arrived four weeks earlier, to the Britons' disappointment.

Doomed Expedition to the South Pole, 1912

An excerpt from Scott's diary, dated February 17th, regarding the first death as they made their way home on skis (unlike Admundsen, Scott had dismissed the use of dogs in favour of horses, which died in the extreme conditions):

After lunch, and Evans still not appearing, we looked out, to see him still afar off. By this time we were alarmed, and all four started back on ski. I was first to reach the poor man and shocked at his appearance; he was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten, and a wild look in his eyes. Asked what was the matter, he replied with a slow speech that he didn't know, but thought he must have fainted. We got him on his feet, but after two or three steps he sank down again. He showed every sign of complete collapse. Wilson, Bowers, and I went back for the sledge, whilst Oates remained with him. When we returned he was practically unconscious, and when we got him into the tent quite comatose. He died quietly at 12.30 A.M. On discussing the symptoms we think he began to get weaker just before we reached the Pole, and that his downward path was accelerated first by the shock of his frostbitten fingers, and later by falls during rough travelling on the glacier, further by his loss of all confidence in himself. Wilson thinks it certain he must have injured his brain by a fall.

On March 29th, the following entry was written:

Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority...We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last...Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale...

Subsequently, Scott has been both championed as a great English explorer and criticised as an heroic bungler. Reading his story, I see a lot of the roots of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, the campaign we played for so many months.

Today, the US research station at the South Pole is known as the Admundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in recognition of these men's endeavours.

Some random tidbits

1. We finished the Antarctic adventure in the game today. Yay! The toll: one of our group is dead (9 total for the expedition, plus two more for the Germans), one lost his right leg, and two have very, very low sanities. All in a good several months' work for our game master. We are all relieved the campaign is over, including the person running it. It has worn us all down. And all the player characters were very new, on their second to fourth missions. All and all I suppose it's surprising we did as well as we did. After all, most of the 'doomed Starkweather-Moore expedition' did come back.
   
2. I don't want to sound alarmist or like a hypochondriac [a common thing for me], but a little while ago I was driving along and I noticed that my right eye was numb and a little twitchy, my right hand was numb, and my right foot had pins and needles. A friend said my pupils looked okay and my grip was fine with both hands. It didn't last long. We decided to consider it a by-product of sleep deprivation (I only got two hours' sleep last night) rather than a small stroke. Hopefully, that's the case.
   
3. I have been invaded by Drosophila repleta, in the fruit fly family but attracted to not only food but drains. They are small but very annoying.
   
4. I am reading Jim Butcher's Death Masks and I was going along on my lunch break yesterday when I realised my book is missing thirty-some odd pages at a crucial juncture. Gah!
   
5. Apparently our store ran out of regular unleaded the day of the run on gas (Friday). Down the street they ran out of everything. The gas truck guy said we were the fourth store he'd been to that day without some form of gas, and I got a couple of calls from people wondering if we had any. Fortunately I didn't work on Friday, although I went in to another store and the cars were four deep; Saturday the gas truck arrived and although there were some glitches at the pumps, everything quickly became less frustrating. I know the gas did rise to $3.99, but come on people, did you really believe it would go to nearly $5 or beyond? We have a fairly aggressive attorney general who is quick to prosecute a company for price gouging. The run on gas was enormous and without warrant.
   

Sometimes you just have to step in and save the world

Warning: I'm about to majorly geek out on you and babble about things which you probably neither understand nor care about, which is the game I play based on the fiction of HP Lovecraft. It's my main hobby. You have been warned.

Today was a good day. Okay, so I didn't finish this week's notes despite a marathon session last night of six hours (but the game master was benevolent). And I didn't arrive when I was supposed to be somewhere this morning (I was a minute late). And I didn't finish some work I was doing for someone on time.

But the game absolutely rocked. For those of you who play Call of Cthulhu and intend to go through the campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness, you should read no further. This is a friendly spoiler alert.

***************SPOILER*******************

So we've been playing the Antarctic adventure for MONTHS, from checking and re-checking the ship's manifest to exploring the citadel of the Elder Things. Last time we explored the great pharos tower in hopes of finding our lost comrades, only to find evidence of their deaths.

For years one of the non-player characters has had visions of this mission; she's insisted all along that she had to be on it and went to great lengths to assure this. She also insisted that she would die on the mission in order to save the world, although she didn't know how, and that is why she had the visions. Each day we got closer and closer to her doom, with her getting more and more depressed. She didn't want to die--but if she didn't, it would be the end of everything. One of the player characters is in love with her, and kept trying to find a way to save her. I have to admit, I did too. I didn't want Sarah to die--she's been in the game for years and we're very fond of her. But it couldn't be as simple as pushing her out of the way at the right moment; there was no way of telling if in doing so we would doom everyone, for if it didn't work, reality itself would be sundered and the world, the universe, would end (and the game, too, unless our game master did some sort of alternative timeline). The stakes were pretty high.

I'm an incredibly passive player, often to my detriment. My character on this mission isn't as fleshed out as the others, although he was slowly coming out of his shell and I've enjoyed that. It is only his second mission, although he'd survived a plane crash (yes, he was the one who fell out of the sky en route to his first attempted mission so many months ago). He has at least one dark mark on his soul due to his sword being used to kill someone after being stolen. He has family, but isn't married, isn't involved with anyone, doesn't have the ties that the others have (one is married; another is in love with Sarah). He has become fond of Sarah and has a lot of respect for her. Unlike the player characters, she never took an oath to protect humanity. He considers her an innocent to protect, along with the ordinary folks they have in tow.

So when the moment came, he took it. The character in love with Sarah showed his Elder Sign when confronted with a shoggoth and a couple of Elder Things. Now the Elder Sign was created by the Elder Things. It surprised them that lowly humans could use it. I had already considered that if we did show the Elder Sign to them, they might recognise us as sentient, and that is what happened. Sarah could read and write their language. They asked if she, too, had the sign, and my character urged her to show hers, which she did. I was thinking that if she were considered sentient, then they couldn't use her in their organic machine to contain the Outer God they'd snared so long ago.

She offered herself up to them to make the machine work, and they indeed, told her that they had never killed anyone within the Unity of the Elder Sign. Then they asked about my character, and he did not show his Elder Sign, and told her that there was no need for them to know he had it, too. The other options were for one of the three ordinary humans along with us to die, or our other compatriot, who was not there at the time. He told her to tell them that they offered him (the Elder Things assumed he was a normal human, and the others' food source) up to the machine to keep the great horror sealed inside the Pit. Reluctantly she agreed. He also asked her to seek safe passage for the rest of them in return for this, and it was granted. Then he was taken away, stripped naked, and fed to a shoggoth alive, going insane at the end. Then his head, with his brain and neural webbing were incorporated into their machine just as the horrible thing began to escape, the power of the creature being such that mountains toppled. But then everything quieted as my character became part of the machine, the central processing unit upgrade that could power it for years to come. Somewhere his soul, with its Elder Sign, will reincarnate eventually. But the remains of his body power the machine at the heart of the Antarctic waste, standing guardian on that which would burst from the Earth and destroy reality.

It was a good death. I have a martyr complex, and I guess it's times like this it comes out. It's only the second character I've lost in the 17 years I've played Call of Cthulhu. The first went insane when she saw Shub-Niggurath and was stepped on by the Black Goat with a Thousand Young. Oddly enough, both characters were Jewish. I feel good about it, although a little sad, too. You get attached to characters when you play them as long as we do. Ours is not the brand of Cthulhu where you run a game now and then, but a continual universe that has developed for nearly two decades, with an excellent game master to bring that world to fruition.

Of course, the campaign isn't over for the others. There's still the Germans to contend with, and getting back home alive. There's another 30 pages left in the module. But it's over for me, except for taking notes and cringing when I think of something that the others don't, and I can't address because technically I'm not really there as a character. But I like to listen to the story unfold even when I can't play, and I want to see the end of this huge, long campaign.

It's moments like this that I really love about roleplaying. How often in the real world do you get to make a difference on this scale, after all?

Want a taste of what we've been doing? Here is a faux trailer for a fictional movie for HP Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' (upon which the campaign is based) put together by a game master for another group. I think the person did an excellent job.

Must remember to blog and not just tweet

(Sometimes when I get home I'm so tired the little micro-blogging of Twitter is appealing. The updates show up on the left panel of this blog, too, if you're interested.)

Anyway, here's what's going on in my life:

1) Tuesday I had a seminar on searching EBSCOHost's CINAHL with Full Text. I must admit, I was somewhat bored, but aspects of it were interesting. And they had ice cream. :) I went over to a friend's and read, did some stuff, then came home by bus and crashed.

2) Wednesday...wait, what did I do Wednesday? Oh, yeah. I went in a little early to work to stop by Walgreens for a Luna bar only to find they were out of Lemon Zest. I walked 20 minutes to work (I'm REALLY out of shape--it's like two or three blocks) only to open up my desk and find...a couple of Luna bars. Sigh. I was surprised by how grown up the little creek I used to walk by had become; a small catalpa tree has soared, intertwining with wild rose. I couldn't see any fish at all, it was so shady. I returned a phone call from a genealogist working on my family tree (no relation; he's doing it for his nephew, who's my distant cousin) and I cheerfully anwered all sorts of questions/volunteered quite a bit even though I don't know this guy from Adam. That's me, alright. Maybe I warmed up to him so quickly because he's gay. I also let slip that a now-deceased great-uncle was actually adopted by the grandparents when one of their daughters had the boy out of wedlock. In the report the guy sent me, it listed me as the source of that one. Hopefully I won't piss off anyone in the family. Then I worked, went home and napped, then went to job #2 till 10 pm. One of our employees has given in her two weeks' notice. :( I got my schedule for the week. Then I came home and crashed.

3) Today I woke up early (although not quite as early as I intended), walked to bank, went through drive-through, withdrew money (couldn't get a money order via drive-through but the lobby wasn't open yet), walked to the gas station, got a money order for my rent, and then my boss drove me back over to my rental office to drop it off since she was doing a gas survey and then took me on to work. :) I worked at the hospital. I moved my PT appointment to tomorrow, since there was no way to bus out there and back in time for job #2. I talked to the mechanic whose name I was given. He's thinking from what I told him it may be in the $350 range, but of course he hasn't seen it yet. I came home and talked to my mom and grandmother on the phone. My mom is trying to quit smoking, yay! Her asthma's been really bad. My grandmother is having cataract surgery next month. Then I took a brief nap. I walked to work for truck night. I talked to one of the truck drivers who is also a mechanic. He suggested I get the 'with-everything' estimate and then I plan to get the 'what-will-be-the-least-I-can-spend-to-make-it-safe' estimate, too. I'll have about $500 to spend on brakes at the end of the month. The garage guy said that if I didn't have enough for what needs to be done they could store it for a couple of weeks so I can get the money together.

One good thing about the car being out of commission is I'm getting more rest. I'm hoping to get my house a little better together; my landlady mentioned that it needed some work. I am such a slob, and yet I hate living in a messy house.

Well, that's it for now. The plan is to get up by 6 am (I was in bed from 10 pm-midnight, but got up since I was hungry) and get some work/laundry done. I found some useful things for the game that I'd like to give the other players. We're nearly at the climax of the Antarctic adventure. The other day at the seminar, one of the librarians mentioned she was going on an Antarctic cruise around Christmas (high summer for there) and someone asked how cold it would be and I piped up and told them, given my now reasonably decent knowledge of Antarctic summer conditions. One thing I will say about this module; they did their homework in terms of research. Now if they'd just laid the thing out better!

:)

Well, it will be pretty dark down there at McMurdo, and you've got to keep warm somehow.

Antarctica base gets 16,500 condoms before darkness

(Aerial photo courtesy of the United States Geological Survey, found at the USGS Newsroom. On that site you can click on the photo and enlarge it.) [A hint to our Gamemaster who might want to show it to the other players, since their characters are currently living in the shadow of Mt Erebus, trying to save the world.]

160 square miles of ice collapsing

Massive ice shelf collapsing off Antarctica

I've been learning about and paying more attention to Antarctica since we started the Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign for Call of Cthulhu, and saw this on the news. Wow.

Hey germaphobes, listen to this:

At the core of snowflakes, bacteria

In order to precipitate, water has to cling to something. A study sampling snowflakes from various parts of the world (including Antarctica), found that in about 85% of them, bacteria were at the nucleus. The most common is a type of bacterium known for causing problems for tomatoes and beans. Of the locations studied, France had the most bacteria at the core of snowflakes.

Aaaagggghhhh!

It's bad enough that the door panel on the inside of my driver side front door of my car has come off and is only hanging by the window controls, so that I have to reach in and adjust it any time I get into the car. Tonight I couldn't get the door to shut because the hinge was frozen. I had that trouble a couple of times last year. Usually I can run the car for a little while and it thaws. No such luck. So I buckled myself in, held the door closed by the top, and drove home (with the dome light on, of course). At one point I had a cop behind me and I was afraid I'd be pulled over for the dome light. I got home safely, and after a few tries, the door finally shut enough that the dome light went out, although I think it's still not quite shut. I hope it doesn't do this tomorrow.

On the good side, one of my co-workers has said he'd put the panel on if I buy the clips. He fixed my tail ligth the other night. It's funny, he's 25 years old and his hobbies are fixing cars, especially Chevettes (which haven't been made since 1987) and playing with an old Commodore 64 computer. He so missed his decade. Since I came of age during that decade, and I even had a Chevette (I had an Atari 800XL computer rather than a Commodore), we have several topics we can talk about, although I start glazing after about 10 minutes of car speak.

On the down side, we played the game today and my character who betrayed a creature who was an ally, half human and half daemonspawn, has now had a second family member killed (her father). The creatures plan to wipe out her entire family in retaliation, but they're doing it in sneaky ways that make it look like accidents or natural causes. Meanwhile on the ship to Antarctica a saboteur has destroyed about a quarter of the food and poisoned the sled dogs with strychnine. So, it's been a particularly disheartening game today.

Speaking of Antarctica--here's a beautiful video of time-lapse photography spanning a year in Antarctica.



Well, I guess that's all--I have to go to bed so that I can get some actual sleep (this is earlier than most of the week has been).

Something to keep in mind as we go on this Antarctic adventure in the game

The seas around Antarctic can be uncertain, even for veterans.


Icy rescue as seas claim a cruise ship

The Explorer spent 40 years in the Antarctic. Another article described it as the first passenger ship to offer cruises to the region. But, like other ships before her, she quietly struck ice and was left stranded in the water, sinking. All the passengers and crew were evacuated, but even in the Antarctic spring water and air temperatures were very cool and hypothermia a real danger. So these tourists got a little more adventure than they probably bargained on.

I'm glad everyone is alright, at least. It's sad to think of such a veteran ship as meeting its end. I'm sure those who have worked and sailed on her will remember her tonight.

Puts my troubles in perspective

You won't be able to read this link freely past the 4th or 5th of October because the Herald-Leader, our local paper, charges for such archived articles, but this story caught my eye. So, I will 'sum up'. Remember the doctor who back in 1999 was stationed at Antarctica and discovered she had breast cancer? I had wondered what happened to her. She'd performed a biopsy on herself with just ice to dull the pain and they made a drop of materials for the slides so she could be sure of the diagnosis and and chemotherapy drugs to treat her. After her return she had a lumpectomy (the cancer had miraculously not spread to the lymph nodes, apparently) and then later a mastectomy due to an infection. She wrote a book (Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole) about her experiences and that was the last I'd heard of her .

Jerri Nielsen was in the area recently giving a talk to raise awareness about breast cancer and she's had further difficulties since then. In 2006 she found out she had bone and liver cancer. A tumour coming out of her skull pushed into her eye socket. She was in Turkey and she went blind. She is now fighting the aggressive form of cancer with chemotherapy, but still tours and practices medicine.

She's an amazing woman. Remember October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. Be sure to do regular self-examinations, get clincial exams as recommended, and have a mammogramme done especially if you're over forty.

I was going to type 'Yay, barefoot at last'

after spending the day in my boot, which was somewhat hot and I felt like Frankenstein a bit. Then I lost my balance changing clothes and twisted my foot as I caught myself, and I sort of wish I'd had it on after that. Ow. Now it hurts up my leg, too. Advil is definitely in order.

All day I've felt off--a little nauseous, achy, and cramping like I'm going to have my period when I had it about a week and a half ago. Maybe I'm ovulating instead. Or the evils of premenopause may be starting. I don't know. But I've just felt under the weather.

Still, I managed to play in the game. We're in New York City preparing to go to Antarctica. Yay! Well, I don't know if it's really 'yay'. Whatever it is down there that lies in wait for us is big and bad and outside linear time. That's never good.

[I wonder if any gamers down in the Antarctic have run this particular campaign--Beyond the Mountains of Madness. That would be so cool.]

I watched the season finale of the 4400. It was great, although I cried.

Now I'm home and I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep. I only got about 4 hours last night because I was fiddling with the landscaping computer CD, which is pretty cool. The only drawback I see is they have house templates, and the only way to design a custom house is to use a related program I don't have. Sneaky people at Broderbund, aren't they?

Things I learnt today

They say you should learn something new every day. Well, thanks to YKWIA, I now know what a kinkajou is. When he was young people kept them as pets. Apparently, they still are. Paris Hilton was bitten by hers last year.

I don't know, they're cute with prehensile tails but have big claws and can turn from affectionate to Satanic for no apparent reason after years of being docile. Hmmm...

I also found myself reading the Wikipedia entry for Marie Antoinette today. I got there somehow through her mother, Maria Theresa, whose ascension to the throne was contested in the Austrian War of Succession. I can't remember why I was there in the first place.

I've also learnt all such of strange facts about Antarctica that I will no doubt recount as we go along in the game. For example, Antarctic Icefish have an antifreeze glycoprotein in their system so they don't freeze in the cold waters of the Southern Ocean.

Speaking of cold, Kevin Everett's ability to move his extremities after a devastatng neck break during a tackle may partly be due to an experimental treatment I've mentioned before in dealing with cardiac arrest. A cooling saline solution is used to lower the body's temperature. In this case, it was thought that it might keep his spinal cord from swelling as much as would normally be seen. It's too soon to tell if Everett will be able to walk again, but I hope that's the case. For more on this technique, see the ALSIUS Intravascular Temperature Management System. It really could do remarkable things both in the future and now.