Only three days left!
Rare French anti-masturbation device circa 1880 for sale on eBay. Starting bid: $1,500.
I think the ventilation holes are an especially thoughtful touch.
Spotted on truemors.com — a community news-aggregator, from what I can tell. Don’t know if the site is going to be anything especially interesting; it looks to be early days. They’ve been advertising on the web-streamed version of WABC. (Yep. Listening to Limbaugh this week. That’s how depressed I am).
February 1, 2008 — 5:39 pm
Comments: 18
Meet my new neighbor(s)
Born Tuesday morning at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence: conjoined twins Faith and Hope Echevarria. Video here. These little girls are zipped together from the bellybutton to the breastbone. They share a single heart and liver, so there will be no separate existence for these two.
A pretty example of synchroniwhotsit: my airport book coming out of Heathrow this time this time was Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. I’ve always had a warm spot for teratology.
I (mostly) recommend it. The good bits are very good. He spends a fair bit of time on genetics and the chemical engines that drive differentiation in the developing fetus. These parts are interesting, but heavy going when you have the attention span of a stoat on an airplane.
It’s an extremely handy book for discouraging your seatmate from striking up a conversation, anyhow. It’s illustrated.
November 2, 2007 — 5:13 pm
Comments: 9
And then came home again
Of course, I’m just guessing here. I wrote this two weeks ago. For all I know, we had a horrible falling out under the strain and it’s all over.
Hm.
Do me a favor. If I come back tomorrow and act like nothing happened and never mention Britain again, we’ll just go on like before, ‘K?
October 30, 2007 — 7:27 am
Comments: 21
The Nobel continues its boogie to banality
So! My old neighbor Al Gore joins Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, Mohammed El Baradei and Rigoberta Menchú as a peace prizolier — which is more than Mahatma Gandhi can say. Did you know it comes with a million and a half bucks? Here’s hoping Gore has to share it with the entire cast of thousands on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has his snout deep enough in that trough as it is.
Like all things controlled by committee, the Nobels have always inclined toward suck.
Take my favorite Nobel recipient — this dude with the funny ears, António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (1874-1955). He pioneered cerebral angiowhotsit — injecting stuff into the veins of the head so that tumors and aneurysms show up on x-ray — which was a very good thing. But he won the Nobel for medicine in 1949 for a very bad thing. Says Wikipedia:
The procedure was the lobotomy. Back in Lisbon he ordered that a human brain be brought to him from a morgue, and thrusted a pen through the cortex several times until he was satisfied he knew the approximate angle and depth that would best detach the frontal lobes. He performed the operation on a former prostitute, who afterwards was unable to give her age or say where she was. She was returned to an asylum, never to be seen by him again. Moniz nonetheless considered this a “clinical cure” and continued operating.
The operation was popularized in the US by clinical neurologist Walter Freeman, whose rough-and-ready version involved poking an ice pick through the eye socket and wiggling it around a bit. No lie. If you get a nice, clean version of the famous photo of him performing this neat parlor trick, you can read the name of the Chicago ice company on the handle of his surgical instrument.
Had the procedure been used as a last resort for the hopelessly, violently insane…it would still be wicked, but it would be forgiveable. As it was, lobotomies were famously given the annoying and inconvenient. Rosemary Kennedy got hers (from Freeman himself) to treat “mood swings”. She lived the next fifty-some years in a convent school as a babbling idiot.
If there’s such a thing as a human soul, I’m as sure as sure can be its proper name is “the brain.” Hence, Dr Egas Moniz won his Nobel for inventing a method of granting thousands of troubled human beings a living death. Murder, if you ask me.
In conclusion: fuck you Al Gore.
October 12, 2007 — 9:11 am
Comments: 16
Something in my house is very, very dead
Note: please pretend this item was topped by a photograph of a squirrel skeleton; a priceless and unique work of the photographer’s art.
Not sure what, not sure where. Best guess: squirrel, walls. Never mind. Nothing says “buy this house!” like the pervasive stench of death.
Changing the subject, I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday (fine, thanks. Blood pressure check) and I read a really interesting article in Discover magazine about spontaneous remission of advanced cancers. Bad news: it’s extremely rare and they still can’t figure out why it happens. They think it’s an immune system thing.
In fact, they theorize that many of us host small cancers throughout our lives that we successfully put down. Only when a cancer reaches a certain potency are our immune systems overwhelmed. They liken it to a fire in the wastebasket: reasonably easy to put out unless the drapes catch.
They make the case that extremely early detection of cancers is, therefore, not such a boon after all. Especially for people at both ends of life. Relatively mild and slow-growing specimens of breast, prostate or skin cancer might smolder for many years with little impact; if you’re old, the cancer may be less life-threatening than the treatment.
When science developed a urine test for the common childhood cancer neuroblastoma, Japan began a routine screening program for infants. Ninety percent were screened, and those with the cancer were treated with the usual combination of surgery, radiation and/or chemo. Not only did survival rates for neuroblastoma not improve, but a percentage of infants died of the treatment. So some percentage of neuroblastomas clearly are either not life-threatening or spontaneously remit. The program was halted.
(I dug around to try and find how many cases turned up before and after they instituted the screen. Interestingly, many hits were to old articles praising the policy and claiming an overall reduction of mortality. Later reports, not so much. Sadly, it takes time for data to catch up with practice. Number of cases caught by screening in one prefecture were ten times the prior number).
This reminds me of something Theodore Dalrymple wrote (in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Medicine, I think): there is no hard evidence that preventive medicine is a good idea. The whole Health Maintenance Organization structure is built on the proposition that catching disease before people feel sick saves money and lives in the long run. Sure, it makes sense. But lots of things that make sense simply aren’t true. Medication problems, mis-diagnosis and aggressive and dangerous treatments make over-doctoring a risky proposition.
Modern Western medicine is a great achievement. The moment I feel sick, you can be sure I’ll run to the man in the white coat and commence throwing Franklins at him.
But there’s a lot to be said for waiting until you feel sick.
August 23, 2007 — 1:11 pm
Comments: 14
Weasel’s happy funtime sack o’ crap links!
You ever get a stupid question stuck in your head and you can’t rest until you get the answer? Man, am I grateful for the Internet. I once haunted libraries and pestered librarians for my answers. Now Mister Google, he do it for me, from the comfort of my own nest of chewed paper.
The question was: what’s the longest anyone’s lived inside an iron lung? And the answer is: 57 years, assuming this lady is still alive. Woke up with polio one morning when she was three. 1950. Brrr.
There are forty people left who use iron lungs; she’s got a spare in the garage in case she needs the parts. They don’t make them any more.
Changing the subject, I totally don’t get this story from the Australian. It’s about how terrorists are operating in Second Life, blowing up pretend buildings and killing people. I understand how objects could be destroyed in SL, but killing people? There’s no dying in Second Life, is there?
They do have a point about laundering money through SL, since you can give money to other players, who then can trade online money for real-world money. But surely huge transactions would red-flag for somebody, somewhere. And the part about practicing for real-world terrorism is just silly; it’s not that realistic. You’d get better practice out of Castle Wolfenstein.
Vocabulary lesson from the Daily Mail: 1661. It’s a woman who looks sixteen from the back and sixty-one from the front. Taking care of yourself: good thing. Wearing tights and sparkly things and glommy jewelry past A Certain Age: not so good. I keep waiting for the Hillarys and Barbara Walterses of the world to give old broads with blond hair a bad name.
If the Daily Mail isn’t low rent enough for you, try the Providence rants & raves on craigslist. No post in particular; just jump in and sleaze. It’s a powerful demonstration of what happens when you give dumb people a platform and complete anonymity. I assume the rnr section is bad everywhere, but I’m confident Providentials are a special kind of stupid.
This guy offers a rich chunk of cartooning fun, melding LOLcats with old timey newpaper cartoons. He’s got the style down perfectly.
Best for last. I love this one. This guy took a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated several times, renamed it awardmestars.exe and uploaded it to a number of software download sites. He gave the ‘program’ this description:
This software does nothing. It doesn’t even run. It was created as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it got. See the results of the experiment at: www.successfulsoftware.net
Two weeks later, it’s gotten sixteen awards and recommendations. Worth reading the article, if you download stuff regularly.
And that’s all I got. It’s the weekend! Now we drink!
August 17, 2007 — 5:39 pm
Comments: 8
Life and Death (now on 5 1/4″ floppies!)
Behold! One of the many ancient boxes of software that hit the junkpile this weekend: Life and Death for the IBM PC. This was a 1988 surgery simulator. Games of the era were always a disappointment; software boxes promised so much and computers were capable of so little. I had an instinct that it was all headed someplace good, and I kept hoping the next game I bought would keep its promises, but they were all bitterly stupid. Bitterly, expensively stupid.
L&D was no exception, but it was cleverer than most. It had some nice touches. They tucked a surgical mask and latex gloves in the box. The instructions included a pretty good history of surgery. The copy protection dealie was in the form of a little pager.
Gameplay didn’t entirely suck, either. Basically, you had two operations you were capable of performing: an appendectomy and some brain surgery thing I don’t remember very well. The game was in two parts. In the first, you examined patients until you found one who needed an operation you could perform. Then you did the operation.
It was a matter of memorizing the actual steps in the actual operation: grabbing the right loop of intestine, popping out the bit with the appendix in, propping it up with gauze, clamping it off…and so on. During which, the EKG would occasionally spike or the patient’s BP would drop and you’d have to shoot him up with the appropriate counteractant.
The flaw, as with so many computer programs, was that it wasn’t enough to know what you needed to do. You needed to know how to tell the computer you had the right answer; which precise, non-obvious clump of pixels you had to touch to activate a particular control. And it all happened in realtime. If you killed somebody (this happened a lot), they sent you to ‘tard medical school for a while before you could come back and try again.
I think I had a 286 at this point — a surplus, genuine IBM AT from work. Home computers of that era could make boops and beeps at various pitches, simulating music, but they absolutely could not deal with an analog signal, play recorded sounds or mimic speech.
So about two in the a.m., I use my simulated hand to palpate a virtual abdomen, and the patient screams, “ooo!” I think I screamed “ooo!” too! Hell-o? Computers cannot do that! I poked that poor virtual lady with the bum appendix over and over to make her squeal. It was a grinding, unnatural sound, like they’d overclocked a chip or thrown the transmission into reverse or something…but unmistakably a human voice. A female human voice. Amazing.
I bet it took one whole floppy disk to make it do that.
August 13, 2007 — 6:28 am
Comments: 28
Slack
I am in such shit.
My work skills were forged in the crucible of short, white-hot deadlines with enormous scary monsters behind them. Magazine work. Support material for speeches. High profile (at least in my little corner of cubicleland), fast turnaround…but, frankly, not all that intellectually demanding. This is my productive place.
Now I’ve drawn one that rests on all my weaknesses. Long and open ended (pff, I’ll do it tomorrow), much coding and script-writing (what, I can’t watch television?!), just me and the client with no third-party oversight (they don’t call me ‘weasel’ for my silky brown pelt). In addition, the client is that potent combination of important and stupid.
I’ve kicked this one down the road for a year, and now it’s back and it’s madder’n hell. I’ve promised to deliver a module a week until August. It’s Tuesday, and so far I have managed to write the email promising to deliver a module a week until August.
I am in such shit.
I’ve pulled off bigger miracles, but just in case, I’m hauling my fantasy weapon out of mothballs — an illness. I’ve never had one. Not a big one. Everyone is allowed one big sick per career, right? I need something big enough to chase the work away, but not likely to result in fraud charges if it isn’t quite true.
So a car accident or cancer is right out. I need debilitating but not newsworthy.
I’m thinking some kind of intestinal trouble. Because, let’s face it, the last thing your boss wants to hear about is your colon.
Blood in the stools? Irritable bowel syndrome? I’m open to suggestions here.
June 19, 2007 — 5:24 pm
Comments: 22
Nervous? I nearly shat m’self
Okay, about those goats. I was wrong. Nervous goats (AKA fainting goats, Tennessee goats, stiff-leg goats, wooden-leg goats, Tennessee scare goats) are not epileptic and they weren’t developed at Vanderbilt.
But we really did have a small herd of them when I was a wee slip of a weasel. And I know ours came from Vanderbilt, where my parents were alums (well, my dad was. My mother dropped out when morning sickness made her upchuck on patients, a thing generally frowned upon in nursing school). The goats worked out a lot better than those experimental lab rats he brought home, that’s for sure.
The proper word for their condition is “myotonia.” They have two mutations on a gene that controls chloride ions in the skeletal muscles, whatever the fuck those are. It means their muscles lock up when they’re startled. Lasts about ten seconds.
They fall down, which really doesn’t give a sense of the thing at all. It’s like the ordinary physics of gravity do not apply. They fall down like cartoon characters fall down. They land with their legs stuck straight up in the air and slowly waving about (see the pictures above). And, because this mostly affects their legs and doesn’t affect their brains at all, they go down with a look on their faces like, “Dammit! What the hell?”
Sometimes the older ones are able to stay upright and drag themselves along, or wobble back and forth like rocking horses. And it’s instantaneous. Like BANG–thud.
See, I’m trying to explain why this was fun and not hateful and cruel. Oh, here. Here’s a YouTube video that might help.
See what I mean? Could you resist knocking ’em down like bowling pins?
Anyhow, if it makes you feel better — as I said in whatever thread I first mentioned these things — the senior billygoat got me up against the barn one day when I was nine and whaled the living shit out of me. Turns out a nine-year-old is not startling enough to flatten an enraged billygoat.
June 11, 2007 — 4:42 pm
Comments: 6
Mooshi-Mooshi, Lord of Ticks
I went to the University of Rhode Island’s Tick Awareness Event on Saturday. My friend the nurse dragged me along. She was like, “it’ll be fun.” And…it was. There were doctors and microscopes and a picnic and giant inflatable ticks and everything.
Seriously, peeps…Lyme disease scares me juiceless. I’m out in the woods all the time, and we’ve got hella Lyme around here. It’s not the big dog ticks you have to watch out for, either — it’s the little teeny bastards. The deer ticks. Usually in the nymph stage, when they’re the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
You might notice the tick. Eighty percent chance you won’t. You might get the tell-tale bullseye rash. Seventy percent chance you won’t. You might test positive, but the tests are very unreliable. My doctor gives me a fight every year when I ask for one. He thinks they’re useless. No matter — there’s no medical consensus what constitutes a true positive, anyway. And, if you test positive, there’s no medical consensus which drugs to use or for how long.
At first maybe you get something like the flu. It goes away soon. A few years down the line, you might (or might not) develop a mysterious arthritis. If you pass that milestone without anybody figuring out what the hell is wrong with you, then you have a shot at tertiary Lyme, which is a lot like tertiary neurosyphilis. No, really. They’re both spirochete diseases.
Symptoms may include fatigue, muscle pain, joint pain (with or without arthritis), inflamed nerves, rash, cardiac arrhythmias, tachycardia, adrenal disorders, immune suppression, urinary disorders, muscle twitching, polyneuropathy or paresthesia, Bell’s palsy, encephalitis or encephalomyelitis, vision problems, severe sensitivity to sound and vibration, balance problems, seizures, myoclonus, ataxia, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, short-term memory loss, sleep disturbance, hallucinations, depersonalization, neurocognitive impairment or psychosis.
If you get there, you’re fucked. You have worms in your brain. You will not get better. The best possible outcome is to avoid getting any worse. This guy at work spent several years battling mystery symptoms — fatigue and weight loss, mostly — before they figured out it was Lyme. Now he’ll have to take fistsful of antibiotics every day for the rest of his life just to tread water.
The best plan: avoid ticks. Deer don’t carry Lyme (mice do), but deer carry the ticks that carry Lyme. In experimental settings (islands and the like), researchers have discovered that eliminating the deer does for the ticks, too. Sadly, eradicating all deer is not considered a viable option. I blame Disney.
So here’s the deal: ticks don’t live in the grass. Too dry. They don’t fall out of trees, either. They live in the moisty undergrowth, down low, latch onto anything that swings past, and start crawling UP. So treat your outdoor clothes from the bottom up: shoes and boots, then socks, then pants. Also gloves then shirts, if you garden. Okay, your hat, too…in case you fall face-first into the rhododendrons. Because we’ve seen you do that.
DEET is great for mosquitos, not good at all for ticks. You need permethrin for ticks — it flat out kills the little bastards. Curl up and die. The spray is okay for boots and gloves and the occasional touch up, but you really need to soak your outdoor gear, inside and out. Remember, ticks crawl up…your pantlegs, your sleeves.
This is the deal the URI people (and the military) recommend: roll up your outdoor pants, shirt and socks and put them in the bag provided. Add the bottle of dilute permethrin and two bottles of tapwater, squoosh it around and let it sit and soak for a couple of hours. Then take the outfit out and air dry it. Once dry, it’s odorless. You get a small fraction of the permethrin dose the FDA thinks is okay. Good for six weeks, including laundering. I wanted to ask how long it would last if you didn’t wash, but I didn’t want to sit alone at the picnic.
I know, I know…a total scary downer of a not-funny Monday post. But I’m all about the minions. Goodness knows the last thing you people need is more brain damage.
June 4, 2007 — 5:41 am
Comments: 6