Random: January 2006 Archives

Mayor Nagin's insane rantings aside, New Orleans may end up being mostly white.

Also, there's a real mental health crisis going on there.

Sorry, but have any Financial Times reporters actually been to the East Bay?

The challenge of keeping Pixar culture alive

By Richard Waters in San Francisco and Joshua Chaffin in New York

Emeryville, a run-down area of Oakland across the bay from San Francisco, is not the place you would expect to turn for one of Hollywood’s most famous names.

Yet thanks to the presence of the sprawling new Pixar studios, a centerpiece of an attempted downtown revival,..

Spotted an ad spread in a magazine yesterday for a product called "Cosmetic Botox". It featured a photograph of an attractive woman on the left-hand page, and a testimonial on the right. It started off with, "I'd heard about Cosmetic Botox for years. Yet something kept holding me back..."

At which point I wanted to yell, "Would that be COMMON SENSE!??!"

Because personally, I can think of few things as unpleasant as having botulism toxin injected into one's forehead.

Besides, a medical resident just told me the other night that apparently women who get their foreheads paralyzed in this manner (yep, that's how it works!) often go on to develop weird lines in other places on their faces instead.

Sounds great!

In this article about bird flu in Turkey, I spotted the following (emphasis mine):

On the human side, the five cases in Ankara hospitals are different from those elsewhere in Asia. Four of the five display only mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all. Also, although all five have had some recent contact with birds, Rodier said, they are people who live on the fringes of a major city, not farmers or people who keep birds in their backyards.

The group includes two sets of brothers: the two who show no symptoms at all, and a set from the distant suburbs who developed mild symptoms after contact with gloves that had been used to dispose of a dead duck. The fifth is a 65-year-old man from inside the city itself, who the Turkish Health Ministry says had "close contact with a chicken," without elaborating on the details.

Oh yes, I have a filthy imagination...

I think maybe this is the thing that shocks me the most about that mining accident...

In an interview with USA Today, Hatfield said if the trapped miners had wireless communication devices, it would have been possible to tell them of a safe way out. The only method of communication at Sago, a wired phone, was destroyed in the blast. He said his company would consider issuing radios to miners.

Can you say, "Cheap bastards?"