What sort of food might a roach coach/food stall in coastal Maine sell? Here in Arizona, they often sell Mexican food. Do they sell fish on the coast? During a scene where my character is walking along the beach or a wharf (haven't decided yet,) she comes across one and orders a quick meal; preferably something regional. I need to know what that might be.

Any thoughts?

So say you went to the Basilica at the Vatican on an ordinary weekday; there's no event, nothing special is happening, it's just some Tuesday or something. What level of clergyman would be attending the church, being there for pilgrims to go talk to, kinda being the priest-on-duty?

Searched: Wikipedia pages on medical schools (US), "semester schedule medical school", "first year medical school", essay Clinical Experiences in Pre-Clinical Years, SWU's med school curriculum site (actual class material password-protected)

Setting: United States, present-day (well, 2008.)

One of my characters is in his first year of medical school. The story takes place in late spring, as the semester is drawing to a close. Due to some tl;dr circumstances, he has to leave town for a few days. After checking the time one morning, he remarks on what he'd be doing in class at that particular moment, were he still at school.

I've found summaries of first-year classes, and basic course schedules, but no real info on what particular tasks med students face during this time. (e.g., are the classes primarily lectures or do they involve dissection, are there small group projects or is it all individual work, etc.)
If it makes a difference, my character plans to go into cardiothoracic surgery.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Babelfish just gave me the kanji (which is interesting, but not quite what I was looking for) and I'm only coming up with online dictionaries when I try to work my Google-fu.

I'm mapping out a cracked Twilight/Yami no Matsuei (Descendants of Darkness) fic and I decided, in a moment of evil whimsy to entitle it "Red Moon" (per the way the moon seems to turn red whenever Muraki is out and about and doing his thing; yes, the fic features Edwierd -- er, Edward crossing paths with the not-so-good doctor), but part of me decided to have the title in Japanese as well as English. Can anyone help me out here?

This needs a tag of 'post-nuclear symptoms made to order'. :)

I'm working on an SF story in which there was a nuclear detonation in a universe next door. Basically, a few people are able to teleport in this universe by slipping in and out of the blast zone in the other one.

I can get lists of physical effects of radiation exposure, of course. (For instance.) What I need to know is how those symptoms would manifest in the specific scenario I've set up: these people are exposed to severe radiation in extremely short bursts, a few weeks to a few months apart, over an extended period of time. I'm particularly interested in the timescales of visible/obvious symptoms - teeth falling out, skin lesions, etc.

I'm guessing there would be some immediate effects after each teleportation, as well as greater problems established by the repeated trips, but I don't know how the overlap of those exposures would work in practice.

(I remember reading about people who deliberately race around the Chernobyl site but haven't been able to track that down. Any leads welcomed.)

Ideally I want them to be killing themselves slowly - in general, able to keep this up for a few years before they're too physically worn out to continue - but if some people die right away (or others hang on for a longer time) then that's fine as long as it's within normal limits of the effects of this pattern of exposure.

The scenario I've set out is what I'm currently working with, but if necessary, I could manipulate a) the length of time they're exposed, b) the length of time between exposures, and c) the intensity of the exposure (they might be able to shield themselves from the worst of it or be on the edge of the blast zone).

Thanks!

Fiddly little name question here.

I want to do something with the genderswapped version of a male character of Indian descent (present day), which means finding a female name that makes sense as an equivalent for "Aasif."

I've poked around sites like babynamer.com to find names with similar sounds, but they don't give me much of a feel for whether the names have completely different connotations, and I don't want to inadvertently pick a wallbanger. (Like how "Ethel" feels very old-fashioned, so it wouldn't be a good substitute for a modern-day character named Ethan.)

Any suggestions?

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Title: Rabbit earred giant.
Rating: T
Words:
Warning: Any similarities to actual persons (living or dead) are just of mere and very, very unfortunate coincidence. Also, it's your fault for noticing any coincidences for writers are the worse people to piss off.
Disclaimers: Any reference to pop/contemporary culture of any kind does not belong to me. Especially this chapter title, Michael Jackson forever!
Previous chapters: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII-A, VII-B, VIII, IX, X, XI


( In a time where there is sex crazed teens and economic uncertainty, the world needs happiness and optimism. AND ANGELS. )

I'm trying to write a bit of Terminator based fic and want John Connor to be practising opening up the head of a terminator to remove the chip. This involves cutting out a flap of scalp (pretty humanlike) and then opening a sealed compartment by using a screwdriver to prise it open (if you've seen T2 of T:SCC you'll know what I mean).

What could he practice on that's easily obtainable? Anything? I know students practice stitching on orange peels sometimes but a peel isn't really big enough to be an analogue of a whole head. Any ideas on what he could use to replicate the chip compartment?

Googling "Human head analogue" and "Human scalp skull analogue" doesn't help at all.

ETA : This is set before Judgment Day. Pigs are still kinda hard for a regular suburban teenager trying to live underneath the radar to come across though. ;)

Googled: medical conditions: violet purple eyes; violet eyes, natural violet eyes


Setting: Present day, America


Issue: I have a character with purple eyes. She’s had purple eyes since the story was first forming in my head, and I am loathe to change them to another color. Will if I have to, but there may be tears. And slight Plot Holes, as her purple eyes are sort of necessary to a few plot points.


I understand that purple eyes are RIDICULOUSLY rare, but that they do occasionally happen. I’m wondering if there are medical conditions (besides albinism) or any medications that can cause purple eyes. If anyone could give some google-able terms or even links, I'd be super appreciative.


Pretty much anything will help. Thanks!


PS: I’ve heard that while Elizabeth Taylor did have purple-hued eyes, they were caused by medical problems as a child. Any truth in this?