A Race for Life
I thought I’d add something for you to listen to while you read*. Not “as shock and awe” as some of the other stuff I’ve written lately ….. apologies.
I could never really appreciate biology when I was in school. I think it was because I always felt that there was more to it than the boring lists that that people ( or more aptly fuddy duddy, bored and unmotivated teachers) kept imposing with regards to what exactly constitutes life and what we call living. Most basic biology books tend to impose a piece of dogma which is used to decide whether a tree, a germ or a hamster is living or not living. This was known as the seven (and later eight) characteristics of living thing. These included:
- Feeding
- Pooping (excreting)
- using the food (metabolizing)
- responding to stimuli (yes, even plants have it, why else would your roses grow at angle indoors)
- reproducing (and lord knows I’m a fan of that)
- growth
- respiration.
Now, anybody with a basic science degree can probably argue that all that is complete total and utter trollop.
But can we call something man made (from single molecules) living? If it can reproduce, divide and feed then can we say that it is alive? Or is it just a very complex chemical like any other? Can we infact create living beings by putting together a couple of living cells or is there more to life?
The Picture Above is a Simulation of one of the first living cells made from scratch by a human.
That’s what some of smartest bastards in the world have been arguing over the past couple of years and in a recent conference in Florence Italy, entitled the 15th International Conference on the Origins of Life it included posters, papers and workshops and presentations centering around the science of artificial cells or protocytology as they call it in the trade.
The thing started off in 2001 when a David W. Dreamer (now Professor Emeritus at U.C. Santa Cruz) published his paper on self assembling molecules where he essentially proved that the same mechanism that allows molecules to form in a cell can be simulated in a lab and work successfully and since then there has been a race on to produce a molecule with a piece of genetic material in it that can reproduce, make a perfect copy of itself and continue to function. Among the forerunners are a team at Harvard, headed by Jack Szostak who have managed to produce functioning models of cells that can infact be called living in that they metabolise (use energy), replicate and die. Another group have been working on artificial bacteria and have even managed to get the damn things to evolve and modify their genetic material.
It’s interesting how close people are getting to producing custom made cells and how little time it took (about 8 years) to come up with what is essential a public beta of a brand new field in medicine, science and even brewing. Unlike the false promise of genetic engineering which has yet to come up with anything more than diagnostic techniques and a couple of pales of grain that aren’t worth the R & D companies put into them, protocytology will probably end up giving more and more incite into how cells form, how genetic mutations, cancer and hereditary diseases happen and how they can be stopped.
It’ll even allow us to develop custom make bacteria, fungi and other living organisms which will lead to a new generation of drugs that’ll be able to augment our immunity (imagine a version of the flu virus that’s close enough to the real thing for your body to develop an immune response to it without actually causing any symptoms or a set of bacteria designed to eat up cells that look cancerous to it) and change the way we grow crops, and be able to enhance and control fermentation and cheese manufacturing (providing you with that perfect wine and cheese combination).
But still there are ethical considerations to be made as one of the guest speakers at the conference pointed out; producing a brand new form of life will mean that we’ll be creating a whole new evolutionary path (assuming that all of us came from that first cell that divided into 2 then 4 then 8 then 16 and so on), something that has never happened before and is not likely to bode well in the end. And I doubt that any of the religious groups out there would be happy about a couple of scientists claiming to have created a new lifeform …….. then again there’s very little that most religious groups haven’t managed to file an objection as of late.
* The music is Make a New Road By Walking performed by the Menahan Street Band. If you liked it then please support them by buying the album.
A Little Less Ballsy than Last Weeks
You can’t talk about balls without mentioning Edward Bodkin and his illustrious (albeit short lived) career as a cutter. Bodkin (like most perves) was born and raised in the farming community of KoKomo, Indiana where he was probably bored and had nothing better to do than sit around and dream of castrating people, livestock and pracitcally anything else with balls.
Now like most bright young people with vision and the desire to cut someone open; Bodkin did the research. He came across a lovely little ‘zine called the Ball Club Quarterly which was described by it’s editor as the magazine “For men into BALLS! Those who have them, those that want them, those that vacuum pump them! Personal ads, generally uncoded, with photos.Good articles and fiction. Excellent reference to other interests such as golden showers, fetishes, tattoos, piercing, sex-clubs, offbeat videos, and very offbeat stuff including: saline injection, enemas, catheters, rough bondage, transsexuals, castration, fisting, bizarre home-made videos, electrolysis, spanking, ball-stretching, rough ball play, sounds, electro-shock, genital modification and more.” and decided to place an ad in it describing himself as a “cutter” (an underground surgeon for piercings, implants and castrations etc). At the time he was trying to attract “voluntary eunichs” who wanted to be castrated(= get their balls removed) voluntary for fetishistic purposes for the most part.The magazine had a circulation of 200 at the height of it’s popularity and surprisingly 10 of them responded to the ad. (you have to understand that the internet that we now take for granted was still largely a bunch of irc channels, newsgroups and a couple of dail-up BBS’s. Not exactly the place where ball fetishists would hang out)
Bodkin at the time of his arrest (I think)
Bodkin offered a DIY castration in which he would take out a persons balls (a.k.a an orchidectomy) in exchange for 2 things:
- A chance to film the procedure and sell it through the ‘zine (ebay was still in it’s infancy back then)
- He gets to pickle the guys balls and keep them a jar at home. He eventually had them in jars in his kitchen.
To his credit Bodkin did manage to perfect the procedure over the course of the nine or so castrations he performed. He started off with nothing more than orange-handled art knife, manicure scissors, a special curved needle (now known as a Bodkin needle in the trade) and eventually ended up purchasing a full surgical set along with horse tranquilizer (kitamine) from a local vet supply store. However despite his best efforts a fair share of his patients/victims/clients did end up developing some amount of bleeding and infection. Most survived in the end.
And the reason why Bodkin only did 9 procedures despite having had 10 people respond to his ad on BCQ is because one of them was a tattle tale and ruined all of Bodkins fun. Victim/client/patient number 10 decided to go to the police one day before the procedure and confessed to the whole thing (It’s a felony to want to get rid of your balls and still be a man in mosts states. Voluntary castration or bilateral orchidectomy can only be done if the patient/person wants it as part of a sex change procedure, for cancer/other diseases or if he is a previous sex offender.*) he also accused Bodkin of wanting to go after kids next (wouldn’t be surprised if the sick bastard did ………).
Fortunately the sick bastard got caught, was put on trail and sent to the slammer; strangely though he confessed and plead guilty to all charges. When asked what his motivation was all Bodkin could say was:
“I can’t sit here as a reasonable human being and give you an intelligent answer to that.”
*Incidentally, I was very surprised to find out that you can now get chemical castration done. The pervs didn’t even have to go to Bodkin in the first place……. fucking retards……
Doc Brinkley: Talk about a Load of Bull
Was reading about the boo ha ha a certain group of doctors have been making about their colleagues at Adan in the paper. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones still they should thank their lucky stars they ain’t working with this fuck-up.
Part of Brinkleys Mega-Bucks Advertising Campaign
It was 1915 and young John R Brinkley, having spent the last 8 years trying to get through the first four years of medical school had finally decided that medical school was not for him, so he joined the Eclectic Medical University in Kansas and for a rather reasonable fee of 500 hundred dollars the boys at the University granted him a nice little medical degree with practically no effort involved.
The now Dr Brinkley (much nicer ring to it don’t you think) went on to open his own practice in Arkanses where he practiced medicine for a number of years, servicing the local farming/meat packer community (who weren’t exactly the sharpest tools on the shelf). Regrettably, one of his patients who at the time was suffering from impotance, loss of libido and a general lack of energy suggested to the young, bright, broke and ever so ethically inclined doctor that perhaps the solution lies in implanting bull testicles in him (seeing as bulls were known for their erm ….. virile nature ….. damn rednecks always had skewed logic). The man even offered him 2500 dollars (the equivalent of 10 grand by today’s standards).
So having been offered the good chunk of change to essentially kill a person the good doctor performed his first surgery (ever) and inserted the bulls testicles into the man and low and behold 9 months later the man had his first child ( yes, it was all in his head and no the bulls testicles didn’t work). Now, Brinkely having been faced with such an excellent opportunity decided to take the money and hire an advertising company, get him self a spot on the radio (” The Doc Box” on KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best) and call himself a fertility specialist with “the only proven cure for impotence” (remember Viagra wasn’t around at the time)
Since then Brinkley went on to make over 12 million dollars over 15 years by performing his procedures on men, women and even children. The vast majority of the procedures when done in the back of his practice while he was drunk and many of his patients developed bleeding, infection and a good number (even by Kuwaiti healthcare standards) died and even those who survived only managed to keep they balls for a couple of months before their bodies reacted to them and destroyed them by inflammation.
A wedding photo from when he married his second wife (yes, he was still married
to his first one at the time…… like most sick fucks that bastard was polygamous*)
A regular person/doctor/false profit would have decided to call it quits after he’d killed a couple of people and many of us would probably admit that we were wrong, however the good doctor insisted that the procedure required a person of “intellegence” for the it to be a success and blamed his patients for his failures (sounds familiar to anyone?) and in the end it took the fine efforts of Morris Fishbein (executive secretary of the American Medical Association) to get Brinkleys licence revoked and even then the bastard tried to run for governor so that he can appoint an new board of directors for the American Medical Association and get his licence back.
Oh well, if it’s any consolation Brinkley died alone, penniless (thanks to the IRS) and with one leg chopped off ……. Yes, Karma is infact a bitch in stilletoes*.
*I can’t spell and wordpress’s spell checker is giving me hell ….. live with it …..
I wanna do that to yer Face !
Click on the title to view the video …. fucking hilarious …..
Merry Christmas to you all …… and Beware of Old Men Bearing Gifts …..
The post was cleaned up alot. Iit had alot more on how Saint Nick was a phoney and most paedophiles used santa costumes, etc …..
Walking around malls in Christmas time (in most westernised countries at least) you can’t help but notice a rather rotund looking person wearing an ill fitting red suite and a fake beard. You also notice a bunch of fed up kids waiting in a cue to take pictures with him and a rather gullible set of parents drooling, wide eyed as they see their kid perched on the lap of a complete stranger wearing a suite and beard to disguise his identity ….. if that aint a M.O. of a paedophile getting his jolly on and abusing peoples sense of faith and religion even more than the clergy then I don’t know what is ……
Besides most historians tend to brush off Saint Nick as one of the made up ones and the whole red and white clothing along with the flying reindeer and the gifts probably came from ancient nordic culture.
Yes, you read right …. it all dates back to time Sami people of northern Europe; they used to have these Shamans who were kind of like the pillar of their community, they would predict the future, go soul searching and generally speaking have all the magical power you’d expect a shaman of good standing to have. They also incidentally wore Red and White Robes and like most hacks who prayed on peoples gullibility tended to grow beards.
The methods by which they performed these super natural feats involved a hefty measure of Muscaria Mushroom (a.k.a. fly agaric) or more commonly psychedelic mushrooms. Now the problem with these mushrooms is they they were never all that potent in their regular form so shamans used to feed the mushrooms to their reindeer (who loved the stuff …. not surprising really, who wouldn’t want to get a buzz on in the middle of winter in 11th century Europe ???) and would collect their urine and drink that instead. So that the active ingredient (muscimol) would be more concentrated and would really have a kick to it …..
Having gotten pissed (yes, the origin of the term is the ingestion of muscimol laced reindeer urine) the shaman would go into a trance and would make a couple of noises (was HO HO HO one of them perhaps?) and experience the following:
- Macropsia (everything gets bigger)
- Expanded Perception (everything will seem to fly around … including his pet reindeer)
- A sense to talking to the higher powers (angels, demons, gods, prophets, etc)
And once he woke up (they were all men in those days) he would tell everyone about it and they’d all think that they were touched by the gods; the shaman would then leave in a customary manner (i.e. through a whole at the top of the hut ….think of it as a poor mans chimney….) and be on his way to go get high with another family he would be visiting that night and probably tell them how he predicted that they youngest son will grow up and have 3 kids, 2 reindeer and be invaded by one of the neighbouring nations/villages giving them the gift of for-knowledge when it comes to calamities, natural disasters and their future in general.
So the next time you decide to tell your son/daughter/kids sister about Santa be sure to mention that he used to get high on reindeer piss, lie to people about what he saw to get a free meal then escape through the roof before they ever found out and remember …… every shopping mall Santa is a paedophile …. no amount of money on earth could make you go through a 6 hour stint with 100 kids screaming at you unless you were sick enough to enjoy it …….
One More Reason to Chug a Bottle of Cough Syrup …..
This post is far too short …. apologies …. ti’s a replacement for a really long Xmas post that was just too filthy …. even for by own lowly standards ….
Cough syrup actually taught me how to drink ….. as a young sickly lad you’d take a gulp of something that feels like it’s burning your tongue then you feel slightly better 20 minutes later …. if that isn’t a prelim to get you hooked on drinking I don’t know what is…. damn drug companies were prolly in cahoots with pub owners back then ……
But besides that cough syrup is good for other things, like getting off crystal meth (thanks, to the codeine* most brands contain …….. except those in Kuwait….. it’s banned here…. well not banned but not publicly available either …..) and getting high (you’d have to chug the whole bottle but it works ……. or so I hear ……. pretty good buzz too) and recently we’ve found out that the stuff is also good for curing cancer ….. well at least a couple of them …….
Dr Isreal Barken’s been using Noscapine (a regular component of most brands of cough syrup) to treat a number of types of cancer including prostate, lung and probably any other type of cancer in which a constant blood supply is required (most fortunately do); unfortunately (not unlike the Ministry of Health here in Kuwait) nobody really knows how Noscapine makes the tumours smaller. Still it does provide hope for the future and lets face it most of us didn’t know that the codeine is cough syrup was getting us high when we first took it at the tender age of four ……
* Codeine is a very mild sedative ….. it’s the stuff in NightNurse in small doses and a couple of shots of vodka in higher ones. Too bad it’s more addictive than heroin)
On Viriginity (alleged or otherwise), Anal Sex and STDs
As much as I’d like to share my thoughts about sex and sexuality (it’s been a while but the memories are still vivid…. I assure you) I think that Aesop in 560 BC may have done a far better job than I ever could when he said:
“It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.”
Ever since I could remember religious groups in the US (as well as many other countries) have been preaching and advocating abstinence and virginity pledges as the only sure fire way to prevent STDs and preserve the sanctity of marriage.
You’d think that their argument would make sense, for the most part sexually transmitted infections (or diseases) (STDs or STI’s) tend to occur as a result of well ….. sex and one could logically infer that taking sex out of the equation would make everybody feel safer and would be the ultimate cure.
However as with condoms, diaphragms, and the oral contraceptive pill the term abstinence seems to be far too complex for most of the US religious right to grasp ….. especially at the tender young age they tend to be roped into the whole thing at ……for the most part the damn kids (13-20) tend to get confused very easily and can’t quiet grasp the difference between no sex, oral sex, anal sex and everything but vaginal sex. And with that in mind a substantial number of pledges have decided to engage in everything but vaginal sex (the damn lemmings think that the backdoor doesn’t count ….. fucking priceless) which has lead to an increase in anal sex amoung the little angels and almost no reduction in the rates of sexual transmitted diseases in that age group.
So it turns out that virginity pledges have done practically nothing to reduce STD rates and have ensured that the incidence of anal sex is on the rise (if that isn’t irony I don’t know what is ….. fucking priceless) and worst still a recent study now says the the vast majority* of pledgers tend to lie about the previous sexual history in the first place (wanting to become born again virgins ….. no wonder they all loved Britney way back when)
Then again all of the studies mentioned/linked to above (not to mention common sense and vivid memories of teenage angst) could all be wrong , as a recent study published be the RAND corp. claims the pledges do actually work and they even make using condoms easier for the little buggers !!! Oh well my bad (its not like the RAND corporation has ever been accused of anything to do with the religious right, trying to influence politics or has ever been run by republicans in the past….. and yes I am being sarcastic)
I guess it’s back to using condoms and wishful thinking …….
SMS Texting Gets a Kids Hand Chopped Off ……
Special thanks to intlxpatr for the butterfly award nomination. I think I got into blogging because I was bored and figured it’d help me kill some time. I’m glad people enjoy reading what I write and hope to continue to impress. I think I’l nominate the following:
Plastic(sorry, I know you hate this type of thing),
L’s Brain (I don’t know how to do that symbol thing …. apologies)
MAR of Alhamour.com
Please let us know how/why you got into blogging etc …… brevity would be appreciated …..
Well not exactly …. Dr David Nott who is currently working with/for/under Medicin Sans Frontiers (or doctors without borders) in the Congo was faced with more than he bargained for when a hippo crushed a young lads arm (when I say arm, I mean all the way upto the shoulders), he had to try and perform a very difficult amupatation which involves the shoulder blades (it’s called an upper limb dis-articulation) and the fact the he had never done it before made matters even worse.The boy would have to face a slow and painful death from the gangrene he would develop as days went by ……
But thanks to modern technology and all the of the fruits it bears the good doctor managed to get a friend of his to send him a 10 step for dummies guide via SMS. The kids is now doing very well all thanks to the fine efforts of telecoms companies around the globe (bar zain and wataniya ofcourse, who can’t even get caller ID turned off for gods sake).
Oh well I guess it’ll only be a matter of time before kuwaiti doctors end up sending SMS’s to the bengali at the door with clear instructions on how to treat their patients (with Adol/cough syrup/ventolin/multivitamins/cortisone) while they bask in their shaleh, home or apartment they keep for that thing they have going on the side………………
We’ll scream at you, give you the wrong meds and maybe even beat you to a pulp ….. but we’ll never rape ya …..
Apologies everyone, I’ve been taking a little break from everything. You see after the erm …. “incident” I’ve decided to strom out of work and have spent the past couple of days watching weeds and playing Gears of War 2 while catching up with my reading ……. Anyway here’s another morbidly distrubing post for all of you to enjoy …….
Our noble profession has recently sunk to a new low and surprisingly this hasn’t been as a result of the hard work (or lack there of) of my collegues here in Kuwait. For the first time in a long time I’ve found another healthcare provider to gripe about, another set of administrators, doctors and ward attendants to prove how dumb/bad/just plain wrong (in the Hannibal Lecter sense) doctors/nurses are.
The british healthcare system (the NHS) was once known for being robust, reliable and efficient, during the 80′s however it did go into s slump (Thatcher blamed the immigrants for the most part) and since then has gone on to try and rectify things.
For the most part they have improved remarkably over the past 2 decades, GP’s actually diagnose people, surgeons try their best to look out for their patients interest rather than just slice and dice and emergencies are dealt with within minutes rather than the 8+ hours US medicare and Medicaid is now famous for and the complete lack of urgency our boys seem to practice like a goddamn national sport.
However as with any corpration, group of people or football soccer football soccer team there’s always the one person who ends up fucking a sheep and giving everybody else a bad name (for boxing it was Mike Tyson, for us it was Bin Laden and his crew and in the case of the music industry it was Britney Spears) and the NHS is no exception.
Over the past few months over 30 different cases of sexual assault on patients have been reported and although they were initially isolated to psychiatric centers (and were therefor ignored by the higher ups) they have recently also been reported on general medical wards. The worst part is that it seems to be happening to patients who are heavily sedated or too sick to do anything about it and the person(s) involed were for the most part fired and set free without enduring any legal penalties, this was mostly because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them (the smart bastards)
So the next time you find yourself pissed of with that MRI appointment booked for next year or that fucked up nurse that bruised you while taking your blood just remember thing could be worse …….
Miracle Maker …….
I’ve always been a skeptic ….. but the kind who likes to try stuff out before he passes judgement on it and jhastises everyone else for believing in it. I’ve tried everything from weejee* boards (home made and store bought) to spiritual teas (which kind of like shrooms only less trippy and more of a let down rather than anything else) to tarot spreads and iching and even “the secret” and that attraction garbage and despite repeated attempts by me and various collegues who I’ve manage to convince to endulge me in the name of science (or lack there of) I’ve let to find a gauranteed method to pull of a miracle.
I’ve also tried to apply these things towards divination, greyhound racing and even prediciting lottery numbers or chance of it raining to no avail. I’ve even used them for things as simple as predicting how a coin lands and none of that crap ever worked….. which leads me to believe that I’ve either got to spend more time reading the hitchhikers guide to voodoo or that I’ve got to be one of the dumbest, most gullible person with far too much time on his hands.
But there is one way to pull of a miracle that I haven’t tried and that has even manged to make into such reputablei ndustry journals as the British Medical Journal, the Journal of Chronic Disease and emedicine and holisitc health and even the discovery channel (and sci-fi).
It’s called intercessory prayer and it would involve a person x and a whole bunch of people whom will call Group y and an event (we’ll call it cancer). The theory is that if person x is heading towards the event (or has been diagnosed with terminal form of it) and Group Y concentrate on preventing it or making it easier on the person then they are bound to succeed (and yes, it doesn’t just work for cancer, it’ll work on the race track too). Apparently intercessory prayer has been proved and disproved since the 60′s and it can either be done prospectively (before you see the thing coming , as in our greyhound race track example) or retrospectively (as in the case of person X who is dieing of a cancer that not even Dr. House can cure).
Now, a skeptic would think that the chances of it working are all down to a psychosomatic effect on the patient and his/herloved ones and a believer would say that it’s down to a higher power and I personally think that regardlessof what makes it work, it would’nt hurt to try it, I’d we’d have very little to lose and we’d I’d have lots to gain if we could pull off this exercise.
On the 19th of November I’m due to be hung,drawn and quartered at work for something I shouldn’t have done but don’t regret (the bastard deserved it).
If you have the time and are keen on trying out this group prayer thing then we can all start from the 18th and see what happens. If you’re too lazy or are not too keen on the whole prayer issue then positive thoughts will have to do …..
If it does work then we’re doing the lottery numbers next week (the U.K. ones, sterling beats the dollar for the time being) and if it doesn’t it’s not the end of the world…. the worst they can do is put a paper in some folder and bring it up when they want a favour off me ….. it’s not like it hasn’t happened before ……
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