Zapped! (not the Scott Baio movie)

I went to the dermatologist today, the rather adorable absent-minded-professorish Dr. Flynn, and he zapped four spots in various regions of my body. He did one on my foot, first, and then went on to do the others, so we were both occupied paying attention to other things than the foot. Then he looked down and said, "Oh!" My foot was sitting in a large pool of blood. Apparently he nicked a blood vessel or something and it bled like crazy. He called, "Renata!" very loudly and his nurse came in to deal with the wreckage. She scolded him right out of the room. She mopped up the mess and put something to stop the bleeding, then a pressure bandage. It was weird because I had felt like my toes were kind of wet before we saw the blood, and I just thought my feet were sweating because of the pain of all the zapping. He's a very good zapper, though. He talks you through the whole thing so it doesn't seem so bad. They are very nice at his office.

I saw the first episode of The Tudors. It's beautifully produced. Also, it's kind of fun to guess who people are before they're named. I saw Sam Neill in a scarlet robe and I thought, Cardinal Wolsey, and I chortled when it was Cardinal Wolsey, because my history is not the greatest! In the jousting scene I wondered what happened to opponants who might have injured the king in the game. Would have it all been considered sport if he were hurt, or would that person have been in the soup? I might have hesitated to ram the king with an enormous lance. I instantly wanted to go and look everybody up in Wikipedia to remind myself what happened to them (it always seemed to be extremely dangerous to be a close friend of the monarchs of England) but I resisted because it will spoil the story. So I only have a vague sense of who gets the ultimate punishment (except for the wives, who I remember pretty well). Jeremy Northam plays an unusual character, for him, a kind of scholarly lawyer who tutored the king and is so pious he wears a hair-shirt and flagellates himself, like Arthur Dimmesdale. No matter how religious they are, people don't tend to wear hair shirts these days.

I'm rereading Have His Carcase. It's such a pleasure to read effortlessly logical writing. The kind of writing that turns a problem inside out, letting the reader see all sides (except the ones the writer is purposely keeping hidden) and you feel the quality of the thinking in all the dialogue.