Greetings!

All right, Crys, it seems we have another sequence of stump-tacular questions from one individual person. I do want to thank Mr. Crys-tastic for submitting questions this week, and would encourage you, loyal readers, to send in your own questions! Be they trivia questions, or advice on your lovelife. It'll change your life!

Maybe.

Now, to answer your questions in sequence...

1) You, my friend, have been made the victim of an urban legend. Not only is this claim patently false -- similar rumors abound of this occuring in Australia, or the UK -- but it is simply impossible (and implausible besides). First sign of fallacy is this, chummer: "Europe" is not a country, it's a continent. The idea that Europe would take a census of all countries inside its borders is insanity defined, as "Europe" is not a recognized body of government. It's simply a name for a mass of land. It would be similarly false to claim that the census that goes around in the U.S. about every seven years is for "North America."

And the part about how it's just an urban legend anyway? I could go into detail, but I won't -- the swell, super-keen folks over at Snopes.com (a fun site to waste time on) have already tackled this particular rumor.

2) Because like the wise man said, God is dead. We live in sad times, sweetheart. Buck up and have some of this poison Kool Aid.

3) Keen! It's funny you should ask such a thing, as a couple of weeks back I (and DarkWolf, and DPW) was subjected to a viewing of CKY Volume 3. Words fail me as I attempt to describe how the sight of a naked jogging man excreting feces onto himself affected me as an individual. CKY stands for Camp Kill Yourself, a group of guys (who also have a band by the same name) who do things that make MTV's Jackass look like Pee Wee's Playhouse. If masochism is your game, my loyal if morally questionable friends, then check 'em out.

4) This is... an interesting question, ladies and gents, but let it never be said that Dr. Goofypants is not up to the challenge. A laceration is going to cause a scar, period -- and the only way to safely remove a scar (without creating a bigger one in the process) is laser surgery. As for treatment of a laceration, let's assume the laceration is fresh, and by "fresh" I mean it was made in the last 24 hours, not "fresh" in the sense that it is def, or jiggy. There are ways to lessen the ugliness of a laceration scar long after the fact, but those treatments use such phrases as "suture" and "gene therapy," so I will assume that you are outside the price range for such a procedure.

As for the aforementioned fresh laceration to the face, it is recommended that you receive treatment within 24 hours, though 18 hours is preferable. Further treatment is not, I repeat, not for the amateur -- we're talking the application of local anesthesia, recutting the wound for a cleaner healing, and other such unpleasant nastiness. If you absolutely must know the gory details, go here. The details are just too icky for me to recount.

Still, if you receive a serious laceration, even if not to the face, whether or not you're going to have a scar is about the least of your concerns. Priorities, man! The worst outcome of laceration healing is that the muscles stitch back together improperly -- thus causing loss of function in the area, and possible increased complications later in life. If such a horrible thing should happen to you, please, please go to a hospital.

5) A long and sticky answer for these long and sticky times. Sleep, and what takes place during it, has been a controversial topic among the psychiatric community as far back as the release of Carl Jung's Dreams, and of course round-table discussions of sleep and dreaming have probably gone on since time out of mind.

Do not take this to mean that the phases of sleep are not well-documented; on the contrary, sleep has long been defined in several distinct phases. The effects lack of sleep have on people are similarly well-documented, and exhaustively researched. Lack of sufficient sleep nightly is said to cause emotional instability, deprivation of cognitive thinking, and increases the risk of psychopathology. In one study, those who had gone more than 72 hours without sleep were found to suffer from delusions and bursts of violent mania.

Conventional psychiatric wisdom has it that an average person needs between 6 and 8 hours of sleep at night -- more for those in their early teens to early twenties, less as you get older (justification, at last, that you young folks should sleep in on weekends!). Having less than that -- or sleeping regular hours, but at inconsistent times -- can negatively impact memory and language skills.

Fine and well, but that skirts the true question. How does sleep recharge a human's "batteries"? Ah, but therein lies the debate. The best minds can only offer that it does recharge a person, but we can only fathom how. This may sound surprising, but in the budding young science of psychology, many treatments and truths are accepted by the simple fact that they are, even if they are not proven. Example: Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT, better known as shock therapy) is still a leading treatment for schizophrenics and severe cases of depression. Why does this work? Some speculate that ECT induces a grand mal seizure in its patients (victims?), and that such seizures balance serotonin levels in the brain. Hardly conclusive, and hardly satisfactory. Nobody really knows how it works, just that it does. So it is with sleep.

I am not a quack.

That's it for today, friends and neighbors. Tune in next friday for yet another barrel of wisdom right here on LethalDeath.com!

Please, write in any questions you may have regarding trivia, love, murder, or hamsters! I'll be glad to answer.

- Dr. Goofypants