7238 – Beware the Ides of March…

Looking through glass eyes. Circles and spirals, curves and turns are the rule of the day.

Lemonade and frozen oranges for breakfast. Puckery, and I’m glad I didn’t brush my teeth *first*.

Shadowboxing before the morning shower.

The opposite of tunnel-vision. Walleyed?

Maybe it’s time for a buzz-cut and reset. This urge will pass.

Considering doing a pulp-style radio-show phone entry. Maybe a retelling of something written in the past. Something brief, maybe 20 minutes or so? Been Digging Firesign Theatre again lately.

It’s going to be all right. Oh blinding light.

I would’ve been great as one of those megaphone singers from the 1920s.

voe-doe-de-o, voe-doe-de-o, doe

Maybe a ukulele.

I’d look terrible in a straw boater, fake-raccoon jacket and striped pants, waving a pennant.

I could say 23-skidoo all I want. I guess I can still do that.

The term “entrenching tool” still makes me laugh. Shovel. It’s a shuh-vel.

“Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around. And he saw his neighbor, which was his mother, and he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold, she bore him in tears, an oak tree, which grew all day, and then fell over, like a bridge…”

Dreamt again of taking a ride with Newt in my own private rail car.


Moment of Lyric –

Won’t do no good to hold no seance
What’s gone is gone and you can’t bring it back around
Won’t do no good to hold no searchlight
You can’t illuminate what time has anchored down


Remaking Night Stalker with Stuart Townsend?


Zombie Attack Survival Test

Official Survivor
Congratulations! You scored 74%!
Whether through ferocity or quickness, you made it out. You made the
right choice most of the time, but you probably screwed up somewhere.
Nobody’s perfect, at least you’re alive.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on survivalpoints

Link: The Zombie Scenario Survivor Test written by ci8db4uok on Ok Cupid

Batman : New Times Pretty Dang impressive! The Return of Adam West as the Voice of Batman, Opposite Mark Hamill’s Joker. Done in Lego. Dick van Dyke as Commissioner Gordon. More about it here.


The Web Site of Pete and Pete


Ritual lets med students bid farewell to cadavers

BOCA RATON — To the ethereal sounds of Tibetan Buddhist chants, 16 first-year medical students at Florida Atlantic University bid farewell Friday to Anna Marie, Meredith, Chet and Sal.

Those aren’t the real names of the four cadavers the students have been slicing, sawing and probing since November in a fourth-floor laboratory in the biomedical science building. They don’t know their true names. So these are the names they gave them.

“We’re here to celebrate the lives and deaths of the people who have taught us,” Robert Blanks, professor of biomedical science, who organized the solemn closing ritual, told the students in the darkened lab, illuminated only by candles.

The students are enrolled at the University of Miami School of Medicine, but are taking the first two years of their courses at FAU.

Only 30 minutes earlier, they had finished a four-hour final exam in Gross Anatomy, which included two hours identifying which nerves and muscles were beneath colorful pins protruding brightly from what was left of the corpses they had toiled over the past five months.

The lab, with its stainless-steel gurneys and cabinets, was stark and sterile. But now, as students reentered the room, the stink of formaldehyde was replaced by the sensual scent of incense. Buddhist chants filled the room. And each student was handed a candle and formed a circle near the gurneys, now adorned with elegant flowers, not dissected corpses.

One by one each person made brief remarks, expressing appreciation for the dead from whom they learned and thanking their teachers and fellow students for their shared experiences. After speaking, each person used their lighted candle to illuminate that of the student next to them.

“They say the body is the temple of the soul,” said Fanny Bangoura, 28, of Cooper City. “I’m grateful people donated their temples for us to explore.”

“I often found myself imagining what they were like when they were alive,” said Gia Marotta, 26, of Boca Raton. “I’ll always remember their faces.”

Students’ reactions to working on the dead varied as much as their subjects. “You just focus on the task at hand,” Bangoura said outside the lab.

For Marotta, it wasn’t that easy. “When you go home and study … you can visualize them,” she said. “For me, one woman had freckles on her chest. I thought she must have liked being outdoors. That’s the part that made me connect.”

Scandals plague programs

The use of cadavers in medical school programs has been plagued by scandals in recent years. This week a jury awarded $800,000 in compensatory damages to the husband and daughter of a woman who was embalmed by Lynn University students in that school’s since-canceled funeral services program.

The Boca Raton school relinquished its embalming license in 2003, and two top officials paid fines following accusations that the students embalmed bodies without family consent.

UCLA’s body donor program was suspended last year after the director and another person were arrested in a probe into the selling of body parts to medical companies for profit.

The director of the University of California at Irvine program was fired after selling spines to a Phoenix hospital in 1999. The university also was unable to account for hundreds of willed bodies.

When Tulane University had a surplus of bodies, it called a body broker, assuming the broker would ship the bodies to other universities. But the broker sold the bodies to the Army, which blew up seven of them in land-mine experiments.

Blanks was a professor for many years at UC-Irvine, but not involved in that school’s problems. He said FAU gets its cadavers from a central state repository. After Friday’s closing ritual, the four corpses used at FAU will be taken to Miami for cremation, he said. The cremains will be scattered at sea or given to family members.

His students say that Blanks makes it clear that cadavers are to be treated with respect. “You’re working on people who were mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters,” he tells them.

“These are not frogs in a biomedical lab,” added his teaching colleague, Douglas Broadfield, an assistant professor of anthropology and biomedical science. “They’re all individuals. We do take it very seriously.”

Cadaver use on the decline

The use of cadavers by medical schools has been waning. Some faculty think that students can learn about human anatomy from studying pre-dissected bodies and body parts or from computer simulations. Others, however, contend that there is no substitute for learning from a real human body.

Blanks is in the latter camp — at least when it comes to teaching future surgeons.

“If you’re training surgeons, you have to have the cadaver experience,” he said. “It’s absolutely necessary they have access to human remains.”

Broadfield agrees. “There’s no substitute for human dissection,” he said. “This is the first person they encounter in medicine where they don’t have to be concerned about their health.”

Back at the closing ritual in the lab, students and teachers finished their remarks, and a melancholy song filled the room with the lyrics: “Gently, gently. Resting sweetly.”

Some bowed their heads in reflection, faces aglow in the candlelight.

Then the bright lab lights came on again, and Blanks spoke one last time.

“Go out and make a new world.”


‘Wedgie’ Added to Webster’s Dictionary

CLEVELAND (AP) — Wedgie, a teenager’s locker-room nightmare, has made it into the dictionary. Webster’s New World College Dictionary based in Cleveland said wedgie was among its new additions to its latest edition.

The new edition will carry this listing: wedgie: noun. a prank in which the victim’s undershorts are jerked upward so as to become wedged between the buttocks.

The dictionary also carries the tradition wedgie definition of a type of shoe.

“‘Wedgie’ was always a part of the high school terminology that you sort of never thought about later,” said Editor in Chief Michael Agnes.

“It never really entered the mainstream until the ’90s. It broke out of high school and, boy – if you don’t know what it is, you’re absolutely at a loss.”

The new edition will reach bookstores by May and has 58 new entries, plus another 20 new senses of existing words (such as wedgie).

The additions include Al Qaeda, blog, cargo pants, irritable bowel syndrome and partial-birth abortion.


I was getting bombarded with autodialer calls from 954-443-9404 (until I call blocked the numbeR) this last week. apparently I’m not the only one. Tsk.

Testing spammer magnet phrases: online poker, mortgage, viagra! We’ll see if this entry gets hit with a bunch of goofy comments.


‘Beheading’ horror in street: “A man was beheaded in a frenzied and prolonged axe attack in a London street today. The axeman, smartly-dressed and in his thirties, felled his victim with one blow and then struck repeatedly ‘as if he was chopping wood’ … When asked why he had done it, he told officers: ‘It’s complicated. It’s private.’… ‘I begged him to stop and he just looked at me without emotion. There was no anger in his face, he did not seem crazy. He was just coolly finishing off his victim. He wanted to destroy him.


I used to believe… “Until I was about ten or eleven, I was convinced that vampires lived behind the U-bend of our toilet, and that if I spent too long sitting on the loo that they would come up and attack me.”


1 year ago – strip mall of sin pics, doug made it to Seattle,

2 years ago– French toast origin… not invented by “Mr. French”, bus piccies, name game, movies with Dan, pelican poem

3 years ago – grand conversation, love quiz, a good Friday five, odd news, miss Cleo born in LA, of American parents, crossword stuff

4 years ago – first hint of the scooby movie, good vs bad stuff about the day, gnomes on snailback

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